Re: Navigating menus with the arrow keys?

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 6 Nov 2001, Kevin A. Burton wrote:

> OK.  most modern GUI toolkits support navigating menus via the
> keyboard arrows and access keys.
> 
> Why doesn't Emacs support this?

Because, with many (most?) toolkits, the handling of the menus is
entirely within the toolkit.  Emacs just calls a function with the
menu data structure, and the next thing it sees is the result: the
final menu item chosen by the user (or nil, if no item was selected).
All the intermediate events, like submenu selections, are not visible
to Emacs.

For those toolkits where this is true, the only thing Emacs can do is
request the toolkit to allow arrow keys for menu navigation.  Someone
should figure out the way to do that in each type of toolkit, and then
implement the appropriate machinery so that it is accessible from
Lisp.

> Any thoughts on this?  It seems to me that if the menus respond to
> mouse events we could easily fix them to work with keyboard events.

You assume that Emacs sees those events.  It doesn't.