Re: [Gretl-users] bug-hunting: underlined letters

On Mon, 5 Sep 2011, Berend Hasselman wrote: > I've been experimenting in Ubuntu 10.04 in VirtualBox. > The behaviour of programs seems to vary. > > In Firefox you use the Alt+letter to go to a main menu item and then > - you can keep the Alt key depressed and press an underlined letter > - or you can let go of the Alt key and and press an underlined letter. > > The Gnome Commander on the other hand wants you to let go of > the Alt key when you go for a submenu item. Nautilus behaves > in the same way. And Gretl of course. I'm seeing the same here on native linux. As an experiment I wrote a minimal test program which just opens a plain GTK window with a menu. There are at least three different APIs for constructing a menu in GTK (though maybe they all come to the same thing internally). Anyway, I tried building the menu in three ways and in all cases it behaved like the ones in gretl and gnome apps, as Berend describes. My tentative conclusion is that apps such as Firefox and LibreOffice, where both Alt-key and plain key can be used to select a submenu item with an underlined letter, must be doing something special to get that effect. In which case I don't think it's worth bothering with.