Wow that's really great about the mapping of elements to the alphabets. Thank you!

First, please, use one thread per item.

- element issue: we might have all three methods: the widget (slow), the contextual menu, and a one key method, perhaps using a modifier key?

- bond angle issue: it is not possible to use Ctrl, Shift or Alt keys, since they are already used by other features. Using the AltGr key is not perfect, since a user might want to use them at the same time as other modifiers, and it is almost impossible without a third hand. I fully agree that the lock trick is far from perfect, but I could not imagine a better way. I'll probably have to find a better solution anyway.

- I already thought about the settings issue. There are a few things that are not straightforward, otherwise, I would have published ACS and CS themes along with 0.8. One issue is that GChemPaint uses pixels while ACS standards use points. You might help a lot with that, I don't publish anything since I'm away from research since many years now, so I never really tried to conform with ACS or other standards. If you can build a theme with one of the standards inside, I'll add it to next version, and if it is not possible, or very difficult, I'll consider it as a bug and change GChemPaint internals so that it becomes possible.

About changing the element, the contextual menu, would work as follows:
If you type, say, an 's' or 'S', you get a menu with S, Sb, Sc, Se, Sg, Si, Sm, Sn, and Sr with the second letter used as shortcut, so that if you type 'i', you get Si. The drawback is that for sulfur, there is only one letter, so only this one can be usedd as shortcut (I don't know of any symbol with twice the same letter), so you'll need to type a second 's' or an arrow and return. The menu will also include abbreviations (such as Ph, of course, if you type a 'p') when GChempaint supports them.
Your other proposal is quite interesting, but much less intuitive IMHO, since the shorcuts for some elements might be all but trivial (say Cl if C is used for carbon and L for lithium).

About the bond angle issue, using the caps lock reverse the angle sign, so to draw a chain, you just need to change the state of the lock for each new bond. I could not find a more simple solution to this problem.

The way it works in xdrawchem is not portable to GChemPaint. xdrawchem accepts any text you type, even non existing symbols. This would give unusable GChemPaint files. One possibility would be to have a pop-up menu showing all known symbols starting with the  typed character where the appropriate one might be choosen (it would become the default element). Would this be convenient for you?

Hi,

First of all, thank you so much for developing this great software! As a synthetic organic chemist, I use this program very frequently.

One major concern that I have had about the software is the ease of drawing heteroatoms. For example, in ChemDraw and XDrawChem, you can place the mouse cursor on top of an atom (carbon atom) and press a key on the keyboard for the heteroatom. This feature enables me to draw structures very fast.

I just love Gchempaint, however, for me to recommend it to my Windows/Chemdraw using colleagues, this issue of heteroatom drawing needs to be resolved.
You guys may even have better ideas than ChemDraw/Xdrawchem. In any case, I would greatly appreciate your consideration of this humble input from a loyal user. Thank you!