Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

Services are available system wide. This means we could have a keybinding service which gives the user one place to set up keybindings. It also means we could have a richer sense of what a keybinding is. Instead of mapping a key to a function in a particular program, a key binding maps a key combo to a command message. All applications that work on documents could have a 'save' or 'new' command. The keybinding service would be responsible for turning a control-S into the save command. I call these semantic keybindings.

Semantic keybindings would also make it a lot easier to support alternate forms of input. Suppose you built a weird Arduino button thing that speaks every time you mash a button. You wouldn't need to write any custom code. Just make the arduino send in a new keypress event, then map it to a play audio message in the bindings editor. Turn a digital pot into a custom scroll wheel. Your UI is now fully hackable.

I need to do some more research in this area, but I suspect semantic keybindings would make screen readers and other accessibility software easier to build.