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Re: C-l while in menu?


From: Ben Wing
Subject: Re: C-l while in menu?
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 03:42:44 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/20020314 Netscape6/6.2.2



Eli Zaretskii wrote:
On 23 Apr 2002, Miles Bader wrote:

Ben Wing <address@hidden> writes:
the fact is that things work quite well when you have only a meta key.
e.g. meta+letter is an accelerator only when such a menu exists;
otherwise, you get the regular binding -- and even then you can
retrieve the shadowed binding with shift+meta+letter.
Do people really like this?

I don't. One ``feature'' that particularly annoys me is that, as Ben
described, pressing Alt alone and then releasing it activates the menu
bar. So if I press Alt and then change my mind, I need to remember to
type ESC or something similar before I can type text again. That's a
real dumper on fast typing.

this is only on for windows, and you can turn this off, of course.


It sounds astonishly annoying to have
random meta keys stolen by the menus, especially since emacs has many
useful and common commands on M-letter keys. E.g., doesn't the `File'
menu steal `M-f', the `Buffers' menu `M-b', etc.?

I think such a mode is inappropriate for Emacs because our menu bar can
change dynamically as a function of what you type. So in Emacs, what
keys will be stolen is not entirely predictable, which makes this even a
worse idea, IMHO.

I'd suggest to find a modifier other than Meta, and use that instead.
Something like Super or Hyper, for example; we support them on Windows as
well. For tty's, we could have some prefix key instead.

you guys are so X-centric in your thinking.  there is no other key in Windows, really.  people *always* expect the Alt key to traverse to menus, and it's no exception here.

as i said before [but it got purposely chopped off], most of the shadowed keys are available elsewhere -- M-f is also Ctrl-right, M-b is Ctrl-left, M-v [the View menu] is Next, etc.  Furthermore, those arrow/cursor-key bindings are more intuitive, and more standard, than the old-style Emacs bindings.  i designed things intentionally so they most all work like this.



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