A lot of the default ShortCuts for the PCB editor make no sense on a German keyboard.
Was it ever discussed to provide a default ShortCut set based on the computers keyboards?
It also could be switched with the language setting (but I prefer English for the program and I do have a Germany keyboard).
Of cause I can change the short cuts, but one of the strengths of KiCad is to have really good default settings.
Marko
There were discussions a long time ago.
Basically, every different language keyboard needs different shortcuts. I believe, even for English, a Mac keyboard is different and a laptop keyboard is missing many keys that exist on a full size keyboard.
The big problems are:
There are nearly 600 available shortcuts.
There are how many different language and style keyboards?
Who is able and willing to sort this all out?
How many users would be happy with only using a default set of shortcuts?
There is an option to export and import hotkeys from an external file. Maybe you can get some Germans together and find some consensus what would be a sensible standard set of hotkeys for a German keyboard.
Changing hotkeys together with language settings seems a bad idea to me. Sometimes people just want to try another language, and changing hotkeys will then probably confuse them. Sometimes we ask forum users to set the language to English to make it easier to give some support. Changing the hotkeys would also overwrite customization of the hotkeys. I think it makes more sense to have files for hotkeys based on country, and then you can load them separately, a menu item just under the language settings would be a logical choice.
I can see only one solution to this problem: changing the whole shortcut/hotkey system so that it would have chained keyboard commands à la emacs. Then using only 7-bit ascii alphanumeric for the default keys and chains. Even then non-latin based keyboards would need a custom set, but that’s inevitable.