Re: menu accelerators

[Mark Leisher <mleisher crl nmsu edu>]

    Lars> More irritatingly, if you press the underlined letter (without Alt),
    Lars> it will activate that item rather than set the letter.  I've never
    Lars> been one to make use of the underscore letters, and now they're in
    Lars> the way of sensible shortcuts.  Is there a way to turn them off
    Lars> completely?

I think I missed some of the conversation here, but the mnemonics are there
specifically to activate menu items.  It works that way on just about every
user interface that supports mnemonics.

Mnemonics arose out of a need for keyboard navigation for people who don't
have or can not use a mouse.  And from personal experience, it is nice to be
able to continue to work even when a mouse is not working.

    Lars> Very possible.  I feel (but not strongly) that the underline markup
    Lars> should go away in favor of right-hand changeable shortcuts.  The
    Lars> underline markup is an ugly mix of name and functionality.

Changeable accelerators are not a good idea for users, just for developers.
Using a GTK+ application I wrote, users started complaining that their
"shortcuts" (in Windows terms) were not working right.  When I looked at it
carefully, their keyboard behavior was causing their accelerators to change,
which was causing a lot of confusion.

I do however, believe that underline accelerators will be needing a
replacement concept in the near future.  Underline keyboard accelerators get
complicated very quickly when you start working with more than one language.
Imagine an application localized for German that does some work with Arabic
text.  You have to make sure the German input method is active before you can
use the underline accelerators.
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Mark Leisher
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