I'm a developer and most of the time I'm inside some "Terminal" using the keyboard, so having to use the mouse for frequent things often slows down my work. Coming from KDE 3.5.x while searching my way around KDE 4.x, I immediately liked Xfce (first stock 4.6.1 on Slackware 12.2, then self compiled 4.6.2) because of its clean and slick interface! And I immediately missed the most important desktop shortcut for keyboard oriented users, <CTRL-ESC> didn't pop up the APPLICATION(!) menu. Quickly solved by adding a keyboard shortcut <CTRL-ESC> starting "xfce4-popup-menu". And completely forgot about that until I saw "Bug 4994". Now trying to understand why it was fixed by using "xfdesktop --menu" showing the "CONTEXT(!) menu" instead of the proposed "xfce4-popup-menu": Reading the manual page, it looks like it's a bug in xfdesktop... $ man xfdesktop [...] --menu Causes an already-running instance of xfdesktop to pop up the applications menu at the current position of the mouse cursor. [...] But the program itself confusingly outputs... $ xfdesktop --help [...] --menu Pop up the menu (at the current mouse position) [...] Hmmm..., was "Bug 4994" solved in the wrong way because even "Nick Schermer" got it wrong saying: "Using xfdesktop --menu instead. Fixed in f71f104." ;-) Please change it to "xfce4-popup-menu", it is expected by most users coming from other desktop environments and it also allows faster working with the keyboard. Thanks
<Alt>F1 is binded by default to xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu (which corresponds to the old xfce4-popup-menu command), while <Ctrl>Escape is binded to xfdesktop --menu. So basically you have to shortcuts, one that works for the panel plugin and another for xfdesktop, you can easily change the shortcut for one or another. Marking as WONTFIX.