Comment 8 for bug 894384

Just to confirm that there's more than one person (still) affected by this, and to provide a second use-case example. Apologies if this bug report is too old to be noticed any more. Although the issue described below doesn't prevent me from doing anything in the long term, it is very irritating.

I'm using 12.04 64-bit with standard Unity (not 2D), and I have autohide set (so the launcher isn't normally visible) to maximise usable screen space on my laptop.

Sometimes I trigger the launcher by accident when trying to interact with GUI elements awkwardly close to the left edge of the screen. When this happens the launcher pops out and covers the items I'm trying to click on, at which point I have no choice but to wait... and do nothing... until the autohide triggers and the launcher gets out of my way again. A common cause of this is aiming for the "back" button in (maximised) Firefox and overshooting, but there are other times when I need to point to several things in succession.

Ideally I would be able to bind some key to let me "cancel" opening the launcher, so that I could keep this at hand when I'm having to work with such applications/websites. The faster this binding made the launcher disappear, the better.

Using corner activation (as suggested in post #6 above) is a poor workaround for me. Since side activation is the default setting and I work with (and support users on) a number of Ubuntu installations, it is hard for me to unlearn its use. So, when I do use corner activation on my own machines, I inevitably only get it right after trying (and failing) to use side activation a couple of times, after which I remember why it isn't working and head up to the corner. This removes one inconvenience and introduces another.

If there isn't much appetite for adding this feature, I'd be (perhaps even more) happy to learn of a keyboard workaround that used existing features instead. I had been hopeful that double-pressing Alt-F1 -- to enter, and then exit, keyboard navigation mode -- might quickly hide the launcher, but it does not.