Re: Key bindings proposal

[joakim]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 12:20 PM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> I dont understand this. I normaly have menus disabled, but I enabled
>> them now to see. In the File menu I have an entry like:
>>
>>  "Visit new file... C-x C-f"
>>
>> Isn't that a "keyboard accelerator"?
>
> Yes, but it is not menu accelerators. Those are underlined chars in
> the menus. (At least on w32 all applications I know of have them,
> except Emacs.)

But did you snip the part about how firefox does it here?

Firefox does the same thing as emacs, it only uses "menu accelerators"
when it doesnt provide a specific keybinding.

see the "organize bookmarks" example.

Anyway, I'm not expressing an opinion on the merits of the various menu
systems as I never use them. I just tried to add a data point.

(As a side-note I always want to try to emacsify a program rather than
programify emacs, so I do understand the urge to arrive at a consistent
overall environment)


>> Or do you mean there is no obvious way to traverse the menus from the
>> keyboard? Could we then promote the use of F10 already in the menu bar
>> text? (f10 is bound to menu-bar-open here)
>>
>> perhaps like the 1st line of the help menu or something:
>>
>>  "Use F10 to start traversing menus with kbd"
>
> That is not the standard way to access menus (at least not on w32).
> You normally use the Alt key to access them. (Here too it is important
> to notice that with all applications I know of on w32 you can access
> menus that way. Except Emacs.)
> Maybe it is still good to tell about f10 since most non-Emacs users
> are not aware of that.

I wasnt either. I sort of just stumbled about the keyboard to see if
something activated menu traversal :)

Anyway, what would you do with emacs normal use of alt then?

Should alt be an emacs event in itself? Maybe this is possible already?

As another related side-note I would like to experiment with modal keybindings
in Emacs, to implement something like ctrl-lock functionality. That
would I suppose be similar to your use-case for the alt key.

-- 
Joakim Verona