I was testing out keyboard shortcuts when I noticed that there were some problems on my Linux box. I was using the CVS from Jan 5th. Alt-E should pop up the edit menu but it does not work. Alt-B actually opens the bootmarks editor, it should activate the bookmarks menu because the B in the Bookmark menu is underlined. Alt-D for the debug window does not seem to work. I hit Alt-Q for the Q-A menu and mozilla exited. It seems that Alt-Q was bound to quit. If this is the case then the menu item should not be underlined! If some of these menu items should not be activated by an Alt-? combo, then they should not be underlined in the menus.

[moving to akkana...]

...oops...forgot we have a menu wench now. ;) over to lady sairuh...

Browser window bindings ... not my area. Cc'ing saari and hyatt for the menu underlining part of the bug.

akkana decided that ALT should be accelerators and not shortcuts, so at present, there is no way to use shortcuts on Linux. Someone will have to tell me what key they want to use for menu shortcuts.

I don't know what the plan is for what the menu key should be set to on Unix ... I was expecting that someone in the ui group would have some feeling about that. I don't think we had a menu access key at all in 4.x, and when I asked in the newsgroups what the mnemonic key was for Motif or OpenWin based apps, no one remembered. Seems like no one is really interested in having a menu access key ... except perhaps for the reporter of this bug, so maybe dejong can comment on which key it should be, given that alt is the accelerator key and not the menu access key. Is there any way of turning off the underlines if the menu key isn't defined?

to [partially] respond: i can see the confusion here --it seems that your trying to use the menu accesskeys (aka, mnemonics or accelerators), but instead are activating the menu keyboard shortcuts. when you hit the Alt key and the letter key at the same time, you'll get the keyboard menu shortcut. eg, Alt+Q (also seen under File > Quit) will quit mozilla. there is a known issue here (bug 22529) where some keyboard shortcuts are not properly implemented. however, if you hit the Alt key by itself, you start the access sequence (note that the File menu becomes indented) --the next key you press, eg, F, will drop down that particular menu (and E will drop down the Edit menu, and so forth). not all accesskeys/accelerators have been implemented either (bug 18613). dejong@cs.umn.edu, does this make sense? if so, am gonna mark this as Invalid.

Oh, neat. I didn't know about this before, but sairuh's instructions work fine on my Linux build. Looks like sharing alt for both mnemonics (menu access) and accelerators works fine after all.

i agree with akkana's earlier comment, however: what should we expect from the UI? ie, should ALT be used for both the shortcut and accelerator as it is now? german, your thoughts? i've changed the component here, since this is sounding like a UE/UI issue (feel free to correct me).

reassign to german. I assume this happens in all windows and not just the browser? Either way sounds like a toolkit issue;)

We had collectively decided earlier (after a newsgroup poll and discussion) to move away from Alt as shortcut and leave this for menmonics only. We decided to use Ctrl as default shortcut qualifier key for Linux et al. This is the state it should be in for beta1. After that we might think about adding a Linux only UI to switching what the shortcut key should be. Passing back to hyatt for getting this into the build.

I have made the change from Alt to Ctrl. Marking fixed. I already have bugs about both of these keys (the primary accelerator key and the menu activation key) needing to be settable in the skin.

verification is blocked by bug 25973.

Moving all UE/UI bugs to new component: User Interface: Design Feedback UE/UI component will be deleted.

On linux build 2000.02.14.09, when shortcuts work, they work using Alt but not using Ctrl. Are we using Alt again for shortcuts? Or should this be reopened?

We are currently using alt, because there hasn't been time to make the modifier key configurable (that's bug 23587).

verif.