How to bring focus to the menu bar by pressing ALT

[hylton]

The standard in Windows is that if an app has focus and ALT is pressed, the menubar becomes focused.

Notepad with focus:

Notepad with Focus.PNG (10.23 KiB) Viewed 2569 times

Notepad with focus after pressing the ALT key once:

Notepad with Focus After Pressing ALT.PNG (13.51 KiB) Viewed 2569 times

Notepad with focus after pressing the ALT key once, then pressing on the down arrow key once:

Notepad with Focus After Pressing ALT and Pressing Down Arrow.PNG (20.2 KiB) Viewed 2569 times

The keyboard shortcut equivalent to this is pressing: ALT+F.

How do I implement:
1. Press ALT to focus the menu bar and then press down to show the menu?
2. Press ALT+F to show the same menu?

Note: The accelerator keys in the LiveCode IDE do not work: ALT+F does nothing, even though F is underlined.

[LCNeil]

Hi hylton,

I believe menu bars are a custom group implementation in LiveCode so default menu behaviours might not work as expected.

It does seem like a single alt click is one of these features not directly implemented but when I press "Alt + F" the file menu pops up as expected on a sample stack that I create. This works both within the IDE and a standalone built from this stack.

Could you supply a sample stack and your LC version and I can happily look into this.

In regards to using a single ALT click, it may be easier to generate your own menu and then use the various optionKey messages to handle such menu interaction.

Kind Regards,

Neil Roger
--
LiveCode Support Team ~ http://www.livecode.com
--

[ToddFabacher]

For you own menu Hylton, you need to set it in the menu builder. For each entry, there is a shortcut checkbox. From there you can choose ctrl, cmd, shift or alt..+ the letter. This needs to be set in order for the menu shortcut to work.

You can set the Mnemonic, which will underline the letter, but the shortcut will not work unless you check it and enter your desired options.

Hope this helps,

Todd