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Agreed that "backspace" has difficulties due to the editcontrol problems. In this case, using "escape" is indeed probably the best option if we decide to go for a single key does everything type approach. Whether or not the majority of the users wish to sacrifice the screen-only behaviour of the escape key as it is currently is to be decided - I shall start asking around.
A "Home" action breaks in the case of dialogs being on screen (should we cancel them - in some cases, such as progress dialogs, this is tricky programatically), so that's not necessarily a good option.
As for "C". It's inconsistent as you'd have to press "C" to bring up the OSD while in fullscreen (music or video) yet if you weren't in fullscreen, pressing "C" does NOT bring up the OSD, rather it brings up the context menu for an item that may be completely unrelated to what is playing. Thus, we use a different key "M" that is mapped globally to show and close the OSD's no matter where you are.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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Actually, one place that would not function well with a "universal back" thing (or at least it wouldn't be as obvious as in other places) is the filemanager.
Admittedly, not a high priority if you're on a box that already has decent filemanagement tools, but if you aren't (apple tv, xbox, in front of the telly on the couch and don't want to bring up a desktop) then it may well be a problem. ESCAPE if mapped to "parentdir" would be contextual (i.e. based on which list you were in) and you'd have to navigate up to the root in one of the lists (but not both) in order to exit from the screen.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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Perhaps we can try and implement this via an edited keymap.xml.
Are there any circumstances where applying a single key to back / escape would cause a conflict? Is there a way of defining which one take precedence?
If one could have it so that escape was the dominant action, but back was implemented when escape was inactive, it ought to have the "universal back" behaviour people are looking for.
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Yes, it's all keymappable.
Take a look how the BACKSPACE key works on the keyboard. There's probably only a few other sections you need to add map it to close.
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I will investigate... :-D
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Again, that's how backspace works.
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This may be off topic but why do none of the settings dialogs support "back" to go back up the dialog chain? They support ACTION_PREVIOUS_MENU to go up one level (as opposed to back to Home), and no ACTION_PARENT_DIR to go up one level. Intentional?
EDIT: Settings dialogs being Settings -> Videos, Music, Pictures, Profiles, Weather, Network, System, Appearance
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Basically as they don't have directories, so that ACTION_PARENT_DIR doesn't really make much sense. Admittedly, this is due to the name of the #define more than anything else.
It's solvable via keymap.xml ofcourse (just map Backspace to PreviousMenu or whatever it is) though perhaps isn't as elegant as it could be.
Perhaps we should investigating calling it ACTION_PREVIOUS_LEVEL and do the changes on the code side instead. I think this has already been hacked in to some places using PARENT_DIR while some of us weren't paying too much attention :p
Cheers,
Jonathan