Re: Navigating menus with the arrow keys?

[Jason Rumney]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     OK.  most modern GUI toolkits support navigating menus via the
>     keyboard arrows and access keys.
> 
>     Why doesn't Emacs support this?
> 
> I don't know.  Would you like to find out why?
> 
> One question is, do the toolkits that Emacs uses have such a feature?
> I don't know if they do.

Xaw does not seem to. The easiest way to tell is to pull down a menu
with the mouse, then try to use the arrow keys to navigate it.

The Motif style guide lists the expected behaviour of keys in menus,
but seems to imply that each application must implement such behaviour
itself.
http://w3.pppl.gov/misc/motif/MotifStyleGuide/en_US/Menu_Traversal.html

MS Windows does offer such a feature and we already rebind f10 to take
advantage of it. GTK seems to offer such a feature too, so effort might
be better spent on supporting GTK as a toolkit rather than manually
implementing keyboard support for Xaw and Motif menus.


-- 
Jason Rumney