GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 772680
Help menu search (Cmd+Shift+/) on Mac OS build does not work
Last modified: 2016-11-02 19:13:11 UTC
Expected behaviour: As in any Mac OS app, hitting the system-wide keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+/ should get you to the search field of the help menu. What happens instead: Nothing. Background: The help menu search will search through all the available menu bar entries (like Unity’s HUD). Just start typing the menu entry you are looking for, press Ctrl+n for selecting it and then press Return. It is an alternative way of accessing the menu, especially helpful when you do not remember the exact position of some menu entry or when you prefer working with the keyboard. The help menu search itself works all right on GIMP when you use your pointer for clicking on the help menu (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of it). It is only the keyboard shortcut for invoking the help menu search that does not work. Looking through GIMP’s Keyboard Shortcuts settings, it appears that Cmd+Shift+/ is not reassigned to anything else. The lack of a keyboard shortcut for accessing the help menu search is the one reason why I have not switched to the native Mac OS build. Instead, I keep using the Macports installation. It does not integrate with the OS, but at least there is a way of accessing the menu entries with the keyboard.
That's implemented in git master as general action search, but uses only Cmd+/, maybe we should special case this to Cmd+Shift+/ if that's a standard Mac feature. Easy enough, setting milestone to 2.10.
Is Cmd+/ supposed to work instead of Cmd+Shift+/ ? But it does not work either. The only way to invoke the help menu search I can see is by mouse click, which defeats the purpose of bypassing the mouse. No permutation of Cmd, Shift, Option or Ctrl with / accesses the help menu search.
That code is only in 2.9 which will become the next stable 2.10. We hope to provide a DMG with our next unstable release.
Note to self: Mitch asked me to try changing the shortcut in app/actions/dialogs-actions.c to see if that works right.
It appears both Mitch and I were confused. The bug is in fact quite simple as described in the opening comment: the macOS shortcut to display the help menu is blocked when GIMP is active.
The problem here is that GTK+ swallows the keyboard combination that shows the help menu. Because of this the key event is never passed to Cocoa which handles the native menu bar. This is best fixed in GDK. There is a patch floating around to fix this, I will be contacting the author of that to discuss upstreaming the patch into the GTK+ repository. Reassigning to GTK+.
The patches I mentioned have just been filed as a separate bug. Resolving this bug as a duplicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 773832 ***