Comment 18 for bug 48671

It's a psychological thing... F2 is not part of the file name so it seems very unnatural for me to have to press F2 when my mind and hand is still on "mouse mode" (well, I grew up in a windows environment so maybe that's the psychological cause)

It's important for users having used to the feature. People will think "hey I can do this very simple thing in windows, why can't I do it in Linux?". Btw, my mom, dad, brother, and sister don't know the F2 shortcut. They use single click on windows to rename files. It's not like the "del" key where it's obvious that it's for deleting stuffs.

You might say that it annoys you when you accidentally activates the rename function, but I beg to argue on this one. How often do you accidentally activate it when the feature is available? I for myself can say that it almost never happens to me. I don't press F2 on windows because the chance of accidentally hitting F1 is higher and pressing that will load windows help which slows down the system when it loads.

* Having this feature:
--- people used to the feature will use it happily
--- if accidents happen, you can just hit ESC or click anywhere else. People encountering the accident will be annoyed, but hey it's called an accident because it rarely happens.

* Not having this feature
--- people used to the feature will be annoyed. And since I think renaming files is quite a common operation they will be annoyed many times
--- you can use F2, but I think it is prone to mishit F1 or F3

Just my opinion...

@soliac: on windows the rename mode is entered only if we click on the file name. So clicking on the icon won't activate it.