On 23 Apr 2002, Miles Bader wrote:
Ben Wing <address@hidden> writes:
the fact is that things work quite well when you have only a meta key.
e.g. meta+letter is an accelerator only when such a menu exists;
otherwise, you get the regular binding -- and even then you can
retrieve the shadowed binding with shift+meta+letter.
Do people really like this?
I don't. One ``feature'' that particularly annoys me is that, as Ben
described, pressing Alt alone and then releasing it activates the menu
bar. So if I press Alt and then change my mind, I need to remember to
type ESC or something similar before I can type text again. That's a
real dumper on fast typing.
It sounds astonishly annoying to have
random meta keys stolen by the menus, especially since emacs has many
useful and common commands on M-letter keys. E.g., doesn't the `File'
menu steal `M-f', the `Buffers' menu `M-b', etc.?
I think such a mode is inappropriate for Emacs because our menu bar can
change dynamically as a function of what you type. So in Emacs, what
keys will be stolen is not entirely predictable, which makes this even a
worse idea, IMHO.
I'd suggest to find a modifier other than Meta, and use that instead.
Something like Super or Hyper, for example; we support them on Windows as
well. For tty's, we could have some prefix key instead.