Monday, September 17, 2018

Why is Y the Abiathar hotkey for Grid?

Here's a little tidbit of Abiathar history.

The keyboard shortcut to toggle the visibility of the grid is Y, not G. Before version 1.0, the menu item to start a new project was called Gather because project creation involves gathering up the several files that represent a level set. (The window to do that, which survived the entire 1.x series and was only retired in 2.0, was internally called the Dependency Gatherer. I don't recall whether or for how long that name was displayed.) The first letter of Gather is G, so that was the hotkey. When I added the grid, I figured that Y was a decent choice because it's close to G on the keyboard.

Feedback I received on the pre-release version informed me that the "gather" terminology was confusing, so I changed the menu item's text to New and the hotkey to N. The grid hotkey apparently didn't cross my mind when I was making that change because it didn't get changed to take advantage of the now-free G.

In version 2.0, the two tools that had no hotkey were given shortcuts. G and H went to the Tile Instance Remapper (effectively a find-and-replace tool) and Tile Instance Locator (find), respectively. H was for "highlight" (the TIL added a highlight to the desired tile) and G was next to it (replace is a related operation to find). Later down the line, the Tile Instance Locator tool became the Find Highlight view mode, but the TIR is still a tool with hotkey G.

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