GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 154060
Use typeahead activation in the menus rather than mnemonic activation
Last modified: 2020-11-06 20:26:35 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?
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.
Marking AP4 to reflect accessibility impact.
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