make hotkeys accessible to the background

[Robert J. H.]

In my opinion, Audacity should only have one global key combination. Any hotkey after that is passed to Audacity.
For instance:
- You press e.g. Windows-a and Audacity gets ready.
- You press r and recording starts.
Screen readers work like this. If you want to pass a key to the underlying operating system, you have to press a key combination first (e.g. NVDA: insert+F2).
For Audacity, the procedure would be just the other way around. No hotkey would be caught until you pressed the magic combination.

That would certainly give the flexibility of not requiring any application shortcuts to be changed. It would have to work without switching focus back to Audacity when you press R.

However it would cause a delay if you forgot to use Windows + A or suddenly heard something you wanted to record that you were not expecting. You could lose the vital start of the recording while you fumble for Windows + A.


Gale

How about pre-caching as on mobile devices?
The global combination could initialize record automatically (if it is not already running) and discard the audio if another key is pressed or the time limit for a secondary key has expired.

[steve]

Audacity should only have one global key combination. Any hotkey after that is passed to Audacity.

Wouldn't that essentially disables using the foreground application? In which case I don't understand how it is preferable to Alt+Tab.

[Robert J. H.]

Audacity should only have one global key combination. Any hotkey after that is passed to Audacity.

Wouldn't that essentially disables using the foreground application? In which case I don't understand how it is preferable to Alt+Tab.

On Windows, it would probably mean that there's a watcher program running in the background to catch all keyboard inputs, i.e. Audacity would be part of the info line of the task bar. That's of course already the case for AutoHotkey and Auto-it.
I have no idea how WXWidgets 3.02 does this global hotkey stuff.
The goal is certainly to let the record run in background and not to let Audacity have any focus.

[Gale Andrews]

In my opinion, Audacity should only have one global key combination. Any hotkey after that is passed to Audacity.
For instance:
- You press e.g. Windows-a and Audacity gets ready.
- You press r and recording starts.
Screen readers work like this. If you want to pass a key to the underlying operating system, you have to press a key combination first (e.g. NVDA: insert+F2).
For Audacity, the procedure would be just the other way around. No hotkey would be caught until you pressed the magic combination.

That would certainly give the flexibility of not requiring any application shortcuts to be changed. It would have to work without switching focus back to Audacity when you press R.

However it would cause a delay if you forgot to use Windows + A or suddenly heard something you wanted to record that you were not expecting. You could lose the vital start of the recording while you fumble for Windows + A.

How about pre-caching as on mobile devices?
The global combination could initialize record automatically (if it is not already running) and discard the audio if another key is pressed or the time limit for a secondary key has expired.

Would anyone want an Audacity global shortcut for Play? If so WIN + A couldn't automatically do record.


Gale

[Robert J. H.]

Would anyone want an Audacity global shortcut for Play? If so WIN + A couldn't automatically do record.


Gale

Yes, recording is probably the only functionality needed.
However, it should alternate between record and stop as it is currently the case with play.