[Design] [D/f] Feedback on Delete key behavior

[Davor Cubranic]

Sheila Mooney wrote:
> I have been using Chandler daily for a while now. I seem to end up 
> deleting events quite regularly, particularly because I have created 
> them on the wrong calendar. I drag the event to a different calendar 
> and go back and delete the incorrect one. I always use the Delete key 
> for this which actually removes all instances of this event and puts 
> them in the Trash. Perhaps, I am just used to iTunes but I wish the 
> Delete key simply removed the event from the current collection since 
> this is what I intended on doing.
>
This is something that I occasionally run in with Ecco, which is an old 
PIM using a similar concept of a repository of items that can belong to 
multiple collections, so I thought I'd bring up issues this feature 
could introduce.

Ecco has two different "delete" actions: remove an item from the current 
collection (DEL) and delete the item completely (Ctrl-D), so its Delete 
key works similarly to what Sheila proposes that Chandler do. But this 
means that you can have orphan items: items that don't belong to any 
collections and are therefore never shown in views other than when they 
match an explicit search on their text. Orphans are kind of annoying and 
take up space in the repository, so somebody wrote a command-line tool 
to check the repository for orphans. It is not an ideal solution, so 
maybe a better option for Chandler would be to put up an alert that the 
item is about to become an orphan, with options to "Move to Trash" and 
"Cancel".

Davor