I have inherited code maintenance of a legacy app that has been used for 10+ years. We have a small group of users who use it and only 1 or 2 new ones each year, due to employee turnover etc.
One thing I've noted is that we are repurposing keyboard shortcuts for non-traditional purposes. For instance, bringing up the Options menu is CtrlP and exiting the app is CtrlX (keyboard shortcuts that are usually used for "Print" and "Cut" respectively).
I've brought this up and suggested that we change them to standard ones (such as AltF4 for Exit, as is standard for most Windows apps), but there were two concerns that were raised:
- Legacy users have become accustomed to these non-standard keybindings
- This isn't a text app and has no print functionality, so the user would not expect Cut and Print to be features that are supported.
Are these valid concerns? Or should our legacy app that uses universal shortcuts for non-standard functions change to more traditional keyboard shortcuts?