Epic: Introduce Actions page to the Settings UI

[zadjii-msft]

written and maintained by @carlos-zamora

Description

A largely missing part of the Settings UI is actions. This will allow the user to customize their command palette and key bindings without the need to go into the JSON.

Much like the implementation plan for the Settings UI, there are many moving pieces to this that are outside of the TerminalSettingsEditor project:

• Implement inheritance/layering behavior for settings lists/maps #8100: Inheritance for actions
  • enables ability to track where an action came from
  • PR Introduce ActionMap to Terminal Settings Model #9621
• serialization for actions
  • step 1: general serialization
  • step 2: only serialize meaningful changes into settings.json (don't serialize the whole thing)
  • PR Introduce serialization for actions #9926
• Design Settings UI representation
  • PR Actions page design spec #9427
• Implement proposed design
  • Foundation (PR Make Actions page editable #9949)
    • delete a key binding
    • set the key chord for a key binding
    • miscellaneous work (i.e. keyboard navigation, accessibility, etc...)
  • Set Action
    • change the action for a key binding (PR Allow setting the action on Actions page #10220)
    • add a new key binding (PR Add the 'Add new' button to the Actions page #10550)

Some follow-up work items:

• Key chord editor/listener
  • Instead of parsing key chord text, it'd be nice if we could listen for key chords.
  • Inspiration: We should take a look at how PowerToys got around this problem.
  • Inspiration: An old version of SUI also had this implemented (back during the hackathon).
  • PR Add a KeyChordListener to the Settings UI #10652
• "the unbound bug"
  • Edit switchToTab to win+shift+q. Save. Edit switchToTab to ctrl+shift+t.
  • "unbound": "win+shift+q" appears but doesn't need to exist.
• Actions::_GetContainerIndexByKeyChord optimization
  • We're just doing a O(n) search for a matching key chord, but we could technically do this much faster.
  • The list is already sorted by command name, so if we...
    1. use GetActionByKeyChord() to get the Command
    2. perform a binary search on the list using Command::Name() (assuming it has a name)
  • we should be able to accomplish this search in O(log n) time (usually)'
• Performance
  • Clicking Actions in the left bar of Settings takes about 3 seconds to load and doesn't cache/keep it
• Keybinding editor could be clearer #11341

Bugs:

• Settings Model:
  • Saving in the Settings UI breaks "iterateOn" #10365: not serializing top-level "iterateOn" commands! (PR Bugfix: serialize iterable commands #10373)
  • GetKeyBindingForAction doesn't always find the given action (PR Ensure equality when hashing default args and no args in actions #10341)
• Settings UI:
  • Pencil icon (Edit button) on Actions page is invisible with light theme #10406: Edit button on actions page is invisible with light theme

References

#7175 should be kept in mind during this design.

[gpotter2]

You can add your feedback as comments in this issue

Here are some personal suggestions regarding the UI. Sorry if I missed something, I didn't try out #10220 yet

• Group the actions by category (e.g. Keybinds that handle tabs, keybinds that handle panes, custom keybinds...). This will make it infinetly more user friendly. Alphabetical sorting (current) isn't really useful, when even the default order of ALL_SHORTCUT_ACTIONS is better.
• (I personally thought it would have been fancier if simply clicking on the key combo allowed to replace it instead of having to click on the pencil that only appears once the cursor is already on said key combo)

Also massive +1 on follow-up - Key chord editor/listener. That would be pretty life-changing

Thanks again for this amazing work