[Bug 304477] [NEW] Ctrl-L is a poor keybinding for "Clear"

[Ben Gamari]

Public bug reported:

The Ctrl-L keybinding to clear the conversation history in empathy is
horribly annoying. At this point, most applications (most notably
nautilus and gedit, but many others as well) have followed the lead of
Firefox to use Ctrl-L to present a "Go to location" UI.

It is remarkably annoying when you press Ctrl-L expecting this and yet
your current conversation is cleared due to empathy accidentally still
having focus. Moreover, "L" is on the home-row of most keyboard layouts,
thereby making it extremely easy to hit accidentally.

I have hit Ctrl-L accidentally countless times both out of finger-
fatigue and just carelessness. This requires me to interrupt my thought,
go up to the menu, open the log window, find the log, restore my
previous mental state, and then keep two windows open until I'm finished
referring to the conversation history. From a desktop usability
standpoint, that's a pretty destructive operation for a home-row
keybinding.

As a distribution which seeks to meet Apple's standard of overall
desktop usability (especially for casual users), issues like these are
going to need to be handled on a community-wide level (hence the various
projects included on this bug). There are few ways to alienate new users
faster than by putting legacy-driver keybindings with little
applicability to every-day tasks in easy-to-hit positions.

Moreover, in this instance, the legacy argument hardly holds water.
While in terminal applications Ctrl-L has historically redrawn the
screen to recover from terminal corruption, this doesn't map onto the
GUI environment. Having a clear key is certainly understandable, but
putting it in a home-row position is just sloppy UI design.

** Affects: empathy
     Importance: Unknown
         Status: Unknown

** Affects: empathy (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

** Affects: gnome-terminal (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

** Affects: pidgin (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

** Affects: xchat (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

** Bug watch added: GNOME Bug Tracker #563004
   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563004

** Also affects: empathy via
   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563004
   Importance: Unknown
       Status: Unknown

** Also affects: pidgin (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: gnome-terminal (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: xchat (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

-- 
Ctrl-L is a poor keybinding for "Clear"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/304477
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