Re: menu accelerators

[Guy Harris <gharris flashcom net>]

On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 10:50:44PM -0600, Lars Clausen wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Dec 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> > as far as i can tell, this is not a built-in feature of GTK, but
> > something done by the GIMP. the menu accelerators in my Gtk-- apps do
> > not appear to be dynamic.
> 
> Well, Dia does it as well, as does Eye of Gnome, Gnome Control Center,
> Gnotravex, Glade,...

...Ethereal...

As far as *I* can tell, it's a built-in feature of GTK+; Ethereal's menu
bar is extraordinarily boring and vanilla - we didn't do anything to
enable it.

> haven't found any that doesn't do it.  Maybe Gtk--
> disables it?  I'm very happy to have this an inherent feature of Gtk.

The mouse-pointer aspect of the feature hasn't ever bothered me.

However, if you do Alt+{character} while a menu item is activated, *even
if the mouse pointer isn't over the menu item*, it makes Alt+{character}
the accelerator for that menu item; this means that if you're driving
the menu via the keyboard, you'd better take your finger off the Alt key
before striking any menu accelerator key, or, instead of activating the
menu item whose "mnemonic" (to use the Windows term - i.e., the
underlined letter in the menu item, if any) is the character in
question, it assigns a new mnemonic to the currently active menu item,
which is probably the default item.

I don't think that's ever gotten in my way; however, it *might* surprise
somebody used to Windows (where I think the Alt key can be down or not
when the menu-item mnemonic is pressed) or, I think, Motif (which, if I
remember correctly, requires that you *keep* the Alt key down).

> I'm not sure if they're automatically saved, though.

They're not, at least not in Ethereal; i.e., an application would
presumably have to save them itself somehow.