GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 555799
gnome-terminal's ALT- shortcuts for menu bar make command line editing a pain
Last modified: 2008-10-13 10:37:27 UTC
When typing in a terminal, the menu bar is hardly ever used. In the English locale, bash's next-word (ALT-F) opens the File menu, which is hardly ever what you'd want. In the Dutch locale, previous-word (ALT-B) opens the File (~Bestand) menu. Therefore, gnome-terminal should not set any [ALT-] shortcuts for the menu bar. I know that the menu bar can be disabled, I have done so for years, but when doing frequent reinstalls or working on other people's account this gets annoying. Possibly it's time to fix this. Other information:
You can disable the mnemonics from the Keybindings editor (Edit menu, Keybindings...). *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 330754 ***
So there is a second way to disable the shortcuts. Great. I must have been unclear in my bug report, sorry. I was not asking for an easier or alternative way to disable the shortcuts. What I'm requesting is to *disable* the shortcuts by *default*. From my point of view, having shortcuts on a terminal does not make any sense. They are annoying for any reasonably experienced user, because they make using the terminal application itself [partly] unusable. The fact that they are enabled by default, means that by default the application is shipped in a [partly] broken configured state. That can hardly be helpful for novices. What do you expect a novice bash user to think when she reads about ALT-F and Alt-B bash shortcuts and find them to open the menu? 1) I am not supposed to use ALT-B/ALT-F editing shortcuts 2) I am not supposed to use bash with gnome-terminal, or not supposed to use gnome-terminal with bash 3) The bash documentation is broken or out of date 4) Gnome-terminal is just a toy application, experienced users use something else 5) Free Software is just as broken as Microsoft crap, you need to configure everything before to make it usable and we obviously cannot fix this "ourselves" 6) Wow, how great and consistent this free software is! The menu bar shortcuts even work in applications where is does not make any sense, and they can be disabled in several ways!