Comment 0 for bug 1113420

Revision history for this message
Dražen Lučanin (kermit666) wrote :

I find the <alt> key ergonomically very useful (it can be pressed with a thumb without moving any of the "letter" fingers) and I would like to use it for many custom keyboard shortcuts (there is a reason why it plays such a big role in Emacs and the whole OS X for that matter).

Currently, though, <alt> is hardcoded to activate window menu entries (such as <alt>+F for the file menu, <alt>+E for the edit menu) and there is no way to surpass this functionality in all the applications. Personally, I find these shortcuts quite useless - they take you to "copy", "paste", and "open file" which have standard shortcuts anyway (with the exception of preferences, which for some reason don't have a standardized shortcut even though that's often the only thing a person looks for up there).

Expected behaviour
-----------------------------

What I would like to see is a global option to disable these alt+<key> menu shortcuts to free up the <alt> key for other uses (similar to the option already available in gnome-terminal, only global). Preferably, activating this option would also remove the first-letter underlining in the menu to indicate to users that they can't acess it through shortcuts.

(I marked nautilus for apport to collect my version numbers, but this affects most applications - didn't know what the right target is)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.5.90.really.3.4.2-0ubuntu4.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-23.35-generic 3.5.7.2
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-23-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu10
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Feb 2 13:22:32 2013
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/nautilus
GsettingsChanges:
 b'org.gnome.nautilus.window-state' b'geometry' b"'931x626+1+80'"
 b'org.gnome.nautilus.window-state' b'start-with-status-bar' b'true'
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-10-19 (106 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release amd64 (20121017.5)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)