Accelerators missing from dialogs in KDE 4.3

[Richard Dale]

On Wednesday 29 July 2009 04:43:50 pm Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> Richard Dale wrote:
> > I personally think the whole concept is broken of having letters
> > underlined in menu items to denote which key you need to press with alt.
> > And the underlines look really ugly - the Macintosh doesn't have them at
> > all and looks much better.
>
> How else would you indicate what is the accelerator letter?
As I say above, the Macintosh doesn't have them. If I want to quickly do a 
'cut' operation I type command+C, I don't type alt+E to select the edit menu 
followed by alt+C to cut. Why do we need two sets of mechanisms for doing 
things from the keyboard? 

For dialogs, the Mac doesn't have any way other than tab through the form or 
clicking on a field to go to it. But it has never bothered me. I could type alt 
+ <a random character> to go to a field on a form like the KDE login panel 
which has all of two fields in it (what is the point of accelerators there?).

But whether or not I use these things I still have to put up with random 
underlines all over menus and forms, which half ruin the superb efforts made by 
KDE artists and programmers working on Plasma themes, Qt styles etc.

> > Is there really no better way of invoking menu items from the keyboard
> > than by using alt + 'a fairly random character' ?
>
> Given the size of the set of possible actions at a given menu level, I
> can't think how you could possibly invent something more efficient
> (beyond assigning shortcut keys to everything). And that is impractical
> for dynamic menus.
>
> I don't use accelerators /often/, but when I do I find them to be
> extremely helpful. Generally they are most useful for an action that you
> do frequently, or that you need to do many times on a single occasion.
In Windows at least, there is an option to only show the underlines if you 
type 'alt'. 

-- Richard