added key handler for control-s to notebook, seems to work pretty well

[fawce]

Hi,

There was a thread on the dev list about key bindings and hooking ctrl-save to trigger a new save (http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/ipython-dev/2012-January/008674.html).

What makes this hard is that the browser will only trigger keyboard events for the element that currently has focus. To see what this means, open a google docs spreadsheet. Hit ctrl-s, and you'll see a quick status in the header that your doc is being saved. Now, click on a menu and leave the menu dropped down - ctrl-s now will ask you to (completely pointlessly) save the html of the page. In google's spreadsheet this oddity is almost never an issue, because you almost never notice this discrepancy as you're almost always keyboard focused on the sheet.

In the updated UI, notebook's layout has the same convenient property as google docs, where focus is almost always in the notebook element or a child. The only way I was able to end up without focus in the notebook was to click the menu. As long as a menu is dropped down, the ctrl-s triggers the browser's dialog.

thanks,
fawce

p.s.
This PR is from a branch based on a pull from ellisonbg/master.

[takluyver]

As I understand it, this will catch either Ctrl-S or Meta-S (which is Alt-S?) on any platform, which isn't ideal. I don't do much Javascript - is there a neat way to only catch the shortcut relevant to the platform?

[takluyver]

Thanks for tackling this, I think it will be good for usability.

[takluyver]

Thanks for tackling this, I think it will be good for usability.

[fperez]

Thanks @fawce!

@takluyver, I tested this on Firefox and Chrome (linux), with an Apple keyboard, and I see no problems. Alt (meta) and the Apple key are not captured by this, only Control-S works. And I assume that @fawce is on OSX, so for him this makes Cmd-S (Apple key) work as well.

It is indeed a big usability win, so I'm merging it now. There's always the chance we can get a bug report from some user on some combination of platform/browser, but the only way to find out is to merge and put it out for public use.

[fperez]

Thanks @fawce!

@takluyver, I tested this on Firefox and Chrome (linux), with an Apple keyboard, and I see no problems. Alt (meta) and the Apple key are not captured by this, only Control-S works. And I assume that @fawce is on OSX, so for him this makes Cmd-S (Apple key) work as well.

It is indeed a big usability win, so I'm merging it now. There's always the chance we can get a bug report from some user on some combination of platform/browser, but the only way to find out is to merge and put it out for public use.