Named style behavior [was Re: change keyboard shortcuts]

[Nicholas Riley]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 03:12:37PM -0700, Gernot Maier wrote:
> is there a way to change keyboard shortcuts?
> 
> I would like to have a shortcut to change the color of text (something 
> like the shortcut the make it bold), which currently takes several mouse 
> clicks.

You can use the named styles to do this; that's what I do.  They get
automatically assigned to the function keys.

It reminds me of another thing - is there a way to do "Show Styles
View" other than the menu?  I often find my named styles are being
misapplied - i.e., if you have a heading with a single subhead and
apply a style to the subhead, it gets saved at the level of the
heading, which means that additional subheads get the style when I
don't want them to, and there's no way to turn off the style from the
keyboard I know of.

The "Style Attributes" palette doesn't show attributes of subheads, so
if I delete the last styled subhead of some heading, the style is
lurking in wait to reapply the next time I create a subhead, yet it's
not visible anywhere in the UI I can tell.  If it's the only heading
in the document, it's even worse - the Styles View shows nothing even
when I click on the subhead, because the style gets applied to "All
level n rows", and neither does the style get updated in the drawer
(is there a different "All level n rows" being used here that I'm
unaware of?).  Yet worse, the promotion of the rule from "children of
XXX" to "All level n rows" appears to happen only when I create a
second subhead, so you think it's local, but then SURPRISE!

Compared with MORE's rules, which were more logical, visible without
requiring a special mode, and above all entirely manipulable from the
keyboard, I find OmniOutliner's styles to be really painful - second
only to the notes toggle behavior, which I've already reported... why
on earth must I enter a note before I can hide it?

I tried using the Keyboard Shortcuts in System Preferences to set a
shortcut for "Show Styles View", but they stop working after I do
various things which I imagine cause OmniOutliner to refresh its menus
(such as clicking in the topic), until I pull down the menu again.
This might be a Cocoa/Carbon bug, but it'd be nice to have a standard
keyboard equivalent.

BTW, if any of the above is a result of my misunderstanding
OmniOutliner's style system, please let me know.  I run into the above
problems many times a day, because I use named styles to mark items in
my to-do list as "priority", "in progress" and so forth, and very
often end up with unintended style application as I describe.

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>