[ricster]

When you have a list, e.g. a folder full of music and you press a key nothing happens unless you also press shift to make it a capital letter, then it jumps to that point in the list, because all the artist names start with capital letters.

bit daft that, isn't it?

[Hitcher]

It's got nothing to do with them being case sensitive, it's simply because the keys have other shortcuts when used without SHIFT.

[YodaEXE]

As Hitcher said, it's not case sensitive at all. Shift is a modifier key. It's no different than holding Ctrl+c to copy things. The keys have multiple functions, such as c being the context menu normally. That's why you need to hold Shift, so that XBMC knows that you want to jump down the list, instead of opening the menu.

[jhsrennie]

Speaking as someone who has twice beaten his head against this (with no result other than a headache):

XBMC differs from apps like e.g. Microsoft Word in that unmodified keys like P for Play and X for Stop are used for commands. In Word any unmodified character is assumed to be text input and all commands are modified e.g. ctrl-S for Save etc.

Now XBMC (obviously) isn't a word processor, and I have to admit that I like being able to use a single keypress for commands. But this does mean you can't usefully use unmodified key presses for list navigation. After all, it's not much use being able to press e.g. "d" to navigate to titles starting with "D" when pressing p, q, f, r, m, s, c and x will execute a command instead of navigating (there are probably other single key commands as well, but those are all I can remember offhand!).

It has been suggested that all commands should be combined with ctrl or shift, to leave the unmodified keys available for list navigation - Windows Media Center works this way. However I suspect that a few minutes of having to press ctrl-shift-P for Play and ctrl-shift-S for Stop would rapidly become tiresome.

So the current approach is that (outside of edit controls) pressing the shift modifier has the special action of navigating in lists, and shift isn't used for any other purpose. If anyone can suggest a way round this that won't cause mass uprisings do feel free to say so.

JR

[ricster]

Actually, that makes sense, I retract my complaint and will press shift from now on


The only thing that might be plausible is to make it a user configgable option. Like you said at the moment textboxes can override the keyboard shortcuts, lists could optionally too, the list would have to be in focus (top item highlighted, for example) and then at this point pressing the key would jump to that point (actually I'd like to be able to start typing MAR and instantly see the list whittle down to Martha Wainwright and Bob Marley... Don't want much, do I?)

[jhsrennie]

How about having a search sequence starting with a key? For example you could have ctrl-F (or any key of your choice) turn on quick search mode. So to find Martha Wainwright you'd type ctrl-f, m, a, r, etc. Pressing Enter or ctrl-F again would go back to normal do you could press P to play whatever you'd found.

JR

[ricster]

Yeah something like that would be great, though I'd see it as more of a filter than a search as I wouldn't expect it to walk the directories to find individual MP3s, just whittle down the list I'm looking at.

[jmarshall]

Filter and Search in the music library already do that.