Command Buffer for Accessing Menus

["ricardo colon" <rico colon gmail com>]

Hello GTKers.

This might be my one and only posting to this list.

I posted the following email to the Ardour(http://ardour.org) development group.
One of the replies suggested that maybe my feature request is better suited at
the GTK level.

So here I am.

Here's the email I sent to the Ardour devel mailing list.
Tell me what you think about such a feature being in GTK.

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Many times, I feel that having to drag over a mouse to a drop down
menu and move down to the correct menu takes too much time and
distracts me. By the time I reach the menu, my mind has drifted off to
something else for a moment.

I was thinking it might be cool to have something similar to Emacs
command buffer. This buffer would be used for directly accessing
menus. But instead of using obscure keyboard shortcuts, it would use
keywords.

For example, let's say Ardour has a menu called "Automation".
You would type something like Ctrl-X and then type in "Automation".
The Automation menu would directly pop-up. You wouldn't have to go
through Tools -> Midi -> Automation or anything like that.

"Automation" would be the full-length keyword. To make things quicker,
you could have a "full name" and maybe a shorter name. So for example,
you could type "Ctrl-X automation" or "Ctrl-X atm". and it would mean
the same thing.

Even better, you could assign common command buffer commands to a
single key. So you could bind "Ctrl-X atm" to Ctrl-F1 or something
similar.

Not only would you be able to access menus in the drop down list at
the top of the screen, but you could also directly access sub-menus as
well(instead of having to click through 3 or 4 menus to get
where you want).

In the beginning, you could have this work for the standard menus.
But you could also have user-defined keywords for things like plugins.
Imagine if you had a plugin called "reverb". You'd highlight a portion
of the audio, hit "Ctrl-X reverb" and it would immediately bring up
the reverb plugin (with the selected audio as input if you want to).

Anyway, that's the gist of my idea. I think keywords would be very
intuitive for people and would work well across many platforms. You
wouldn't even have to worry about keyboard shortcuts convention across
different platforms. And I think it's much more efficient than using
the mouse in many cases.

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This could even work for something like GIMP.

Highlight a selection, type "Ctrl-x smudge" and the Smudge menu might appear.
In addition, you could also directly access script-fu plugins.

In any case, I'm not sure where such code would go, but it'd
definitely be a killer feature.
I'm sure there's probably some way to hack up something to emulate
this kind of behavior. But I think it'd be great if there was some
kind of pluggable architecture that all apps could support by
providing the right hooks.

Maybe the command buffer portion doesn't need to be mandatory. Iit
could just be one of many different views or interfaces that could be
used. For example, you could use a Wii remote :-)

Anyway, Hope I'm not wasting anyone's time.
Thanks.