Basic Gnome apps don't follow Gnome conventions. Can we improve this?

The Software and Settings apps don’t respond to Page Up, Page Down, exit app, close window, and probably other keypresses. It’s pretty frustrating! I think it’d be great if Fedora Workstation could provide a uniform, predictable experience.

I realize that there are multiple layers of responsibility — these apps are from other projects, and they’re probably tweaked and configured, and then added to Fedora Workstation.

But where would we start on the road to getting these to work like other apps?

I can easily navigate in these apps using the keyboard: Page Up, Page Down, Alt+arrows, Tab to switch focus… all work.
If it’s not working for you, please specify what’s your system, how you installed the apps, etc.

Thanks!

I see you’re right: the problem isn’t as global as I thought:

In Software, I can use PgUp, PgDown. But I can’t find a keystroke that can exit. (Ctrl-q and ctrl-w don’t work.)

In Preferences, I can exit normally, but PgUp and PgDown only affect the nav bar, and in a weird way. They won’t affect the content pane.

Same here. This doesn’t follow the convention.
As a workaround, you can use Alt+F4.

Yes, I can reproduce also this.
In the content pane PgDown goes down one by one, while PgUp goes two by two.

I guess you should report and discuss these issues upstream in each gitlab repository.

I think, there are issues related to GNOME applications in general.

In some cases, there’s barely any visible difference between active/inactive elements.
E.g. when you press Alt+Ctrl+Del and try to navigate with arrows, or open Nautilus and try using it with keyboard only.

In other cases, the way of switching between control elements/panels seems unnatural.
E.g. sometimes you need to press Tab, sometimes arrows, and the order is not obvious.

May be, there should be more testing for applications to operate with keyboard only, with no mouse/touchpad.