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Bug 154060 - Use typeahead activation in the menus rather than mnemonic activation
Use typeahead activation in the menus rather than mnemonic activation
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: gnome-panel
Classification: Other
Component: panel
git master
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Panel Maintainers
Panel Maintainers
AP4
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2004-09-29 14:46 UTC by Mark McLoughlin
Modified: 2020-11-06 20:26 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Mark McLoughlin 2004-09-29 14:46:31 UTC
Suggestion from Fedora:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=133994

  Currently, if three entries that start with the same letter exist in a
  menu, I have to repeatedly press the letter that they start with in
  order to activate one of them.

  In menus where lots of entries start with the same letter, this makes
  it tedious to activate an entry that is not the first one on the list.

  Instead of jumping from entry to entry starting with the same first
  letter, the panel should support typing the first few characters of
  the string for the item.

My response was:

  Well, the idea is that the first letter in each menu item is used as a 
  mnemonic for that menu item - so its as if each menu item has the first letter
  underlined, except its not actually underlined (if you get my meaning). So, 
  its just like normal GTK+ mnemonics.

  On the other hand, it may be more intuitive to do it the way you suggest since
  there is no actual visual hint that the first letters are mnemonics.

  One more data point - I think Windows does it exactly the same way we do it 
  now. The original bug report for the feature was "I want Ctrl-Esc-r to launch 
  the run dialog just like it does on Windows"


Usability guys: any input?
Comment 1 Calum Benson 2004-09-30 16:59:44 UTC
It's an interesting idea... I guess you'd want to share an algorithm with
Nautilus/fileselector typeahead here (I forget if they cycle through all the
items that start with the same letter if you press the same key repeatedly, or
if they just stop because there's no file starting "ppp" or whatever...
hopefully the former).

The problem with typeahead selections is always that you need to define some
sort of timeout to determine when to clear the typeahead buffer and start over,
and timeouts can introduce accessibility issues.  But I certainly can't think of
any good reason not to experiment with it.
Comment 2 Calum Benson 2004-10-21 16:09:39 UTC
Marking AP4 to reflect accessibility impact.
Comment 3 Calum Benson 2004-10-21 16:52:36 UTC
Apologies for spam-- ensuring Sun a11y team are cc'ed on all current a11y bugs.
 Filter on "SUN A11Y SPAM" to ignore.
Comment 4 Calum Benson 2006-04-26 17:08:59 UTC
Apologies for spam... ensuring Sun a11y folks are cc'ed on all current accessibility bugs.
Comment 5 André Klapper 2020-11-06 20:26:35 UTC
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old bug reports in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years.

If you can still reproduce this issue in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-panel/-/issues/

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be fixed.