Re: Semi-unhelpful error message given when trying to (provide 'CUA-mode)

[David Kastrup]

Jason Rumney <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman wrote:
>> I suspect another miscommunication here.  What do you mean by
>> "accelerators"?  I thought we were talking about typing a letter _once
>> the menu is active_ to select a given menu item.  Is that what you
>> mean, too?
>>   
> Technically, GTK calls these mnemonics, and what it calls accelerators
> are the normal keybindings, which we already display to the right of
> the menu item.
>
>> How do these get selected, with LessTif and GTK?
>>   
> With GTK, the menu item's text contains an underscore before the
> letter which the developer wants to use as a mnemonic. I think lesstif
> does it the same way (I can only find documentation for Motif, which
> does it this way), and in windows, an ampersand is used in the same
> way. On all three platforms, to the user the mnemonic character is
> underlined, and the _ or & does not appear as part of the menu
> text. From what I've read about Mac OSX, mnemonics are not supported,
> instead it has a completion like interface - effectively, the first
> letter of the menu functions like a mnemonic for the first encountered
> menu item, but menu items further down may require two or more
> keystrokes to access.
>
> Probably the best way to handle this then is for the Windows menu code
> to replace _ in menu item text with &, and for mac, tmm and
> non-toolkit X menu code to strip out the _ (or build the code in to
> handle it). Then we can go through our menus and add _'s as
> appropriate.

Menus are often consed together from various modules.  I don't think
that this would work reliably.  I think it would be better when the
abbreviations would be chosen automatically in most cases.  Even
though it might make sense if the automatisms would try to obey
suggestions where possible.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum