Re: C-l while in menu?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On 23 Apr 2002, Miles Bader wrote:

> Ben Wing <ben@666.com> writes:
> > the fact is that things work quite well when you have only a meta key.
> > e.g. meta+letter is an accelerator only when such a menu exists;
> > otherwise, you get the regular binding -- and even then you can
> > retrieve the shadowed binding with shift+meta+letter.
> 
> Do people really like this?

I don't.  One ``feature'' that particularly annoys me is that, as Ben 
described, pressing Alt alone and then releasing it activates the menu 
bar.  So if I press Alt and then change my mind, I need to remember to 
type ESC or something similar before I can type text again.  That's a 
real dumper on fast typing.

> It sounds astonishly annoying to have
> random meta keys stolen by the menus, especially since emacs has many
> useful and common commands on M-letter keys.  E.g., doesn't the `File'
> menu steal `M-f', the `Buffers' menu `M-b', etc.?

I think such a mode is inappropriate for Emacs because our menu bar can 
change dynamically as a function of what you type.  So in Emacs, what 
keys will be stolen is not entirely predictable, which makes this even a 
worse idea, IMHO.

I'd suggest to find a modifier other than Meta, and use that instead.  
Something like Super or Hyper, for example; we support them on Windows as 
well.  For tty's, we could have some prefix key instead.