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Keyboard navigation for categories
Status:
RESOLVED: FIXED
Severity:
enhancement
Product:
Xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin
Component:
General

Comments

Description Graeme Gott editbugs 2015-02-17 16:35:51 CET
Users can use UP and DOWN to browse applications in the current category, but they can not use RIGHT or LEFT to switch focus between the applications and the categories. Users can use TAB to change focus, but then UP and DOWN always bring focus back to the applications.
Comment 1 swordplay 2015-03-02 02:47:24 CET
Seconding this!

You can currently tab around, then hit enter to change categories, but it's not intuitive nor easy and it includes the other button controls.

I suggest right/left arrow to change columns, then proceed with up/down arrow. Therefore, left/right arrow would be required to refocus back into the app column.  

I guess another choice could be something like <METAKEY>+up/down to change categories.  Seems less intuitive, though.

Might be a good idea to remove the tabbing between categories and applications, altogether, so that tabbing is the way to navigate just the buttons. (tab, tab, tab, enter -- launches the power menu, for instance, on my system.)  This may need to be an option somewhere, though, in case of Accessibility issues.

All other keys should continue to select/search as current: ie, the other keys remained focused into the text-entry box.

Also, if you have any influence, the popup key should default to the menu key, not the Windows key.  Windows key makes much more sense for things like window management hotkeys.

This would let you use just 7 keys to get anywhere: Menu, 4 arrow keys, tab and enter.  Simple! :D

These are just thoughts, please don't consider them demands.  Wonderful plugin!

Aloha!
Comment 2 Graeme Gott editbugs 2015-03-04 13:43:48 CET
The tabbing between widgets is actually part of GTK, and a universal way of navigating between all toolkits. I will not add code to try and disable parts of it, sorry.

The basic problem with adding support for LEFT and RIGHT to leave the applications is that the GtkTreeView eats those keypresses. I will need to cleanly work around that.

The keypress to bring up Whisker Menu is not actually handled by Whisker Menu at all. That is processed elsewhere in Xfce, and it is set by your distro. You can configure what it is in the "Application Shortcuts" of the "Keyboard" panel of your Xfce settings.
Comment 4 swordplay 2015-03-20 20:21:14 CET
(In reply to Graeme Gott from comment #3)
> http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/commit/
> ?id=af5e8af6f92faad479bb90bf41dfb50f8210b376

Cannot wait to try this -- waiting for the update to trickle down to me...

Big thanks for your hard work!

Aloha.
Comment 5 rkmugen.linux 2016-01-19 02:00:31 CET
I will just say right from the start that I don't know how to do anything that involves GIT... i'm not a programmer... I am just an end user.  Having said that, I wanted to say that this bug, of not being able to use the keyboard to navigate to the categories on the left part of the Whisker Menu, and also not being able to navigate up or down those categories... it is still present in the version that came bundled when I was trying Linux Mint 17.3 XFCE edition.  It would be nice to have that kind of functionality as not being able to do so seems counter intuitive.  Thanks for your work thus far... Whisker Menu looks beautiful, otherwise!

Bug #11550

Reported by:
Graeme Gott
Reported on: 2015-02-17
Last modified on: 2016-01-19

People

Assignee:
Graeme Gott
CC List:
2 users

Version

Version:
unspecified

Attachments

Additional information