Making darktable quicker to use

Software darktable
1

The new thread about MIDI controllers set me thinking about speeding things up without a controller. What about something like this…

I notice the arrow keys don’t do anything in darktable, not on my setup anyway. Suppose you’ve already set up a module group with your favourites. Now have the up and down arrow keys take you up and down the modules, opening the new one and closing the old one as you go. As you go into the next module, the mouse immediately focuses on the first slider in that module, and you can adjust it by mousing left and right, regardless of where your mouse starts off.
If you need any other controls in the module, you first tell dt you no longer want the slider (perhaps spacebar, perhaps a mouse click) then you use the mouse as normal.
This means you can maybe work with one hand constantly on the arrow keys, the other using the mouse, and more time looking at the effect on the screen rather than looking at the modules.
There are of course lots of possible variations, e.g. instead of focusing on the first slider, you could have a favourite slider in preferences.
Also the left and right arrow keys could maybe be used for zooming in and out.

2

Sounds a lot like vim’s modal editing.

Well you can bind almost any key to any action, especially since the rewrite of the functionality a few versions ago.

Sounds like maybe you want to look at darktable 3.8 user manual - shortcuts

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3

Arrow keys are used to

  • navigate images in the lightroom view
  • pan zoomed images in the darkroom view
  • adjust sliders or comboboxes in modules (once the control has focus)
  • alter nodes on curves (once the node is selected)
  • navigate tree views (like those in preferences > shortcuts)

For this reason, and because a lot of these actions are (or used to be, anyway) hardcoded, it’s probably not a good idea to assign more uses to arrow keys.

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4

There’s 2 sets of arrow keys on my keyboard. Or you could use say Q and A for up and down… I expect there’s a way if you wanted to do some kind of speed-up.

5

Same deal for the numbers on the number pad I guess (which I don’t think work for assigning ratings – I use tenkeyless keyboards so can’t test). IMO all arrow keys and number keys should work the same but for some reason Gtk assigns them different keycodes so they aren’t consistent.

6

This actually depends on the specific keyboard. I’ve had boards with a 10 key that send the same code as the number keys on top of the keyboard, and I’ve had ones that send a different code for the 10 key.