I tested in 3.5.10 and pressing the Alt key,
releasing,
pressing the F key does not work. So this bug has been
around a long time.
Is this a bug? I tested directly in Xfce and sequential
pressing of the keys does not work there. I'm starting to
think this is a GTK problem, although Opera (Qt4) behaves
the same way. Perhaps sequential key presses is supported
only in Trinity apps?
Where does one start looking to debug this?
Some investigating reveals that although standard in the Windows world, many 'nix
based apps don't support this feature. In Trinity and KDE, the ability to highlight
the menu bar by only pressing the defined accelerator key is a feature of Qt and is
defined in $HOME/.qt/kstylerc:
[Settings]
MenuAltKeyNavigation=true
True is the default and does not need to be explicitly set.
Changing that key value to false disables the accelerator key such that the accelerator
key only works when pressed concurrently with a menu mnemonic key.
I tested the false value (requires restarting Trinity) and confirmed that pressing only
Alt no longer selects the menu and pressing Alt along with a menu mnemonic (for example,
Alt+F) still works as expected.
This configuration value is read in tdelibs/tdefx/kstyle.cpp.
I found a Firefox option that almost mimics this behavior:
ui.key.menuAccessKeyFocuses = true
The difference is in Trinity the first menu in the menu bar is selected but does not fully
open, which allows using a respective mnemonic key in the menu bar to open the desired
menu. In Firefox the entire first menu (File) is opened, which is kind of clumsy to then
use a mnemonic key to select a different menu.
I haven't found a generic way to have all non Trinity apps behave the same way as
Trinity apps when MenuAltKeyNavigation=true.
Does anybody know of a similar gtkrc option?
Darrell