[Uncle Skeleton]

My app has an iTunes-like interface, and I'm trying to decide if the keyboard short-cut for removing the selected item (or column if that is the selection) should be command-delete, or just delete. iTunes (and Project-Builder/Xcode) seems to have chosen the latter, but I feel like it's too easy to hit that by accident, and this is an action that can't be undone (I know, make an undo stack...I'll do it later. for now I need to decide).

What are your opinions? cave to all Apple HI decisions? or is there a good reason they chose just delete instead of command-delete? My intuition tells me that the command key is there for....commands. Like "remove item," that's a command. right? And removing an item from the app is kind of like the Finder "move to trash" command, which uses the command key. well, what do y'all think?

[hayesk]

I would say Cmd-Delete. Even if you have undo, it's not something people want to do accidently. Which probably could happen a lot if you have an editable text field anywhere in your window.

Either way, have a confirmation dialogue with the default being "Don't Delete".

[Rickster]

In a view where you're deleting items fairly often and for which deletion is undoable (or trivial for the user to reverse), use Delete. If deletion is uncommon and irreversible, use Cmd-Delete.

Another common option is to have a warning panel appear if the user tries to delete things with just the Delete key, and allow them to bypass the warning by using Cmd-Delete to delete items.