RE: Menu access (meta keys and their bindings)

["Wesley Felter" <wesf cs utexas edu>]

> There IS a problem, though, that I just realized...how do you open an
> Options menu?  Alt-O?  Oops, that's open.  Alt-release alt-O 
> STILL should go
> to Options, though...
> 
> Damn.  Can we come up with some default keyspaces, people?  I'm NOT
> qualified to do that, because I haven't had enough experience with all the
> different OS'es.  I WILL do this eventually, but someone else SHOULD.

There should be two different meta-keys. Ctrl is used to directly activate a menu item; e.g. ctrl-O is File->Open. Alt is used to activate the menubar or its menus.

Of course, we can't hard-code meta keys, so we need generic names. How about having "the meta key" which by default maps to Ctrl, and "the menu-meta key", which by default maps to Alt. Except on Mac hardware, where meta=Command and menu-meta=Ctrl (I would prefer not to use Ctrl for the menu-meta key on Mac hardware, but if Command and Option are already used you don't have much of a choice. Former MacOS users probably wouldn't use the menu-meta key anyway, since MacOS doesn't support that concept. Then again, you could just not map the menu-meta key, which would disable that feature altogether.)

So Ctrl-O brings up the open file dialog, and Alt-O opens the Options menu (assuming the current app has one). Of course, this is only the default keybinding and users can change it to whatever they want. But the UISG is mostly concerned with defaults.

Wesley Felter - wesf@cs.utexas.edu - Hack the Planet