Shortcuts in Swing? (question for pals from Apple) (original) (raw)

Scott Palmer swpalmer at gmail.com
Tue Nov 22 15:25:21 PST 2011

On 2011-11-22, at 5:41 PM, Michael Hall <mik3hall at gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 22, 2011, at 1:34 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi Scott,

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Scott Kovatch wrote:

On the Mac, Alt maps to the option key, which is what you use in combination with other keys to type many non-ASCII Roman symbols. The equivalent behavior of Alt on Windows or Linux is the Command key. This has always been the case on the Mac. Actually, that is not true. The Control key on Windows or Linux is equivalent to the Command key on MacOSX. As far as I know, there are no accelerators to open menus on MacOSX. On Windows and Linux, you frequently have underscores under one letter of the menu label (which you might only see when you hold the Alt key down in modern UIs, something I have yet to learn a good reason for) and when you hit Alt plus that letter, the corresponding menu opens. For example, it is a common assumption by a Windows/Linux person that Alt+F opens the File menu. Frankly, I miss this functionality on MacOSX -- I am one of the few people who prefers that gadget with the 105 pressable items to the gadget with only one -- but hopefully some expert will enlighten me that it exists and how I can trigger it. I'm not quite sure why you even want to see the menu, other than you are used to how Windows works. Command+character should work on OS X absent the awkward visual of the menu drop down. I just tried command+o from one application and the open dialog appeared. For the java app I'm working on I appear to have been negligent and only one option shows the command symbol or 'Apple squiggle' character with the menu option, meaning it should keyboard shortcut. Trying that - Command+f, and this appears in the app console. CmdJConsole: action is Find... it works. Theres a dialog too. I'm not sure why I put out the message, this was probably 'in progress' and incomplete the last time I worked on this. But what, besides seeing the menu when you don't need to, is it that you miss? Also fwiw, the underscore just doesn't look good. I'll take the squiggle.

The problem is that if there is no keyboard shortcut like Cmd-O to open, then the action is completely inaccessible via the keyboard. Also if you don't remember the key you have to switch to mouse control to discover it via the menus instead of using the keyboard to navigate the menus and get the visual feedback that lets you learn what actions are available and what the keystroke is.

Scott

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