GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 84802
Bad keyboard navigation issue for the panel
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Possibly not a bug, but nevertheless turns out that way. To open the application-menu or the foot-menu, you currently have to do it in two operations: 1. ctrl-alt-tab to the panel 2. press F10 Even worse: it's very poorly documented. Finding out how to do this can be quite a challenge even for non-newbies. But: the immensly less used menu for applets can be accessed with a single operation. Opening the foot-menu or the application menu _needs_ a global keyboard-shortcut. I don't use this myself, as I'm a bit of a mouse-person, but I think this is a GNOME 2.0 blocker if GNOME 2.0 is to be the accessibility release. And: it is is a regression from GNOME 1.4.
Well, it isn't an accessibility issue, as ctl+alt+tab is perfectly sufficient for those requirements, but it does seem sort of dumb that neither of these are accessible via the keyboard shortcuts configuration.
This is partly a quirk of the current panel implementation-- you shouldn't really have to press F10 to open the Applications menu once the menu panel has focus, you should just be able to tab along to the menu like any other object on the panel. However, it's currently not technically possible to do this-- hopefully the menu applet will one day replace the existing Applications and Actions menus and make this work more inuitively. I agree that a definable keybinding to open the Applications (and maybe the Actions) menu would be really useful, though, provided it also worked when the menu panel wasn't visible-- in 1.4 I used to have it turned off because it's a complete waste of space, but now that it's the quickest way to launch programs I have to leave it on my desktop :/
Created attachment 9326 [details] [review] patch: adds a keybinding for applications menu with alt+F3
Per Calum, created a patch above that will popup the applications menu if Alt+F3 is pressed.
Created attachment 9328 [details] [review] patch: shows the keybinding alt+F3 in gnome-keybinding-properties dialog
Given that this changes strings, Mark, can we get this in ASAP, please?
This bug was about the foot menu wasn't it? I think Alt-F1 should pop up the GNOME (foot) menu (rather than a panel menu), and I believe Owen Taylor has requested this change as well. From the foot menu, one can get to the application menu and actions menu (since they are contained in the foot menu). This is probably the easier path for the keynav user. I am uncomfortable with the Alt-F3 patch since we need to conserve Func-key bindings for other window manager keybindings. (Calum and I have agreed about this, he's reading over my shoulder ;-) Is this solution agreeable?
Have just raised bug #87275 suggesting the same solution...
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 87275 ***