[Straw-devel] accelerator trouble with the optionmenu and scrolling

[Juri Pakaste]

We talked about this a bit yesterday on IRC, but to summarize the
trouble:

The key to popup a gtkoptionmenu (the category selection widget is a
gtkoptionmenu) is space. We use space for scrolling. That prevents the
gtkoptionmenu from being popped up with keyboards.

Possible solutions:

1) Change scrolling key. 

        I don't like this. I selected space because for me it feels like
        the natural choice for that thing, possibly because I've been
        using unix software that behaves like that for the last ten
        years or so. I suppose we could pick something else, but I want
        to consider our other options first. If we change it, the new
        key had better be good.

2) Popup the gtkoptionmenu manually

        No idea how to accomplish this, and I've tried a fair bit.
        gtkoptionmenu doesn't expose enough API to do this easily; I
        tried to reproduce the internal gtk_option_menu_position
        function in Python, but for whatever reason, it doesn't work
        right. Or more properly, I don't see how the C version works
        right: it uses the widget's allocation information (which is
        relative to the window) to popup the menu (which is done with
        screen position) and I can't see where it takes into account the
        fact that the window isn't necessarily at the upper left corner
        of the screen. Oh well.
        
        Trying to popup the menu with the clicked, pressed or activate
        functions doesn't seem to work.

3) Dynamically change the accelerator map when focused on the optionmenu

        We could install an accelerator map without the space
        accelerator when the option menu gets focus, and an accelerator
        map with space when it loses focus. Annoyingly, we can't access
        the accelerator map created by libglade, so we would have to
        create the accelerators in code.

4) Make space to work only in some parts of the window

        Evolution seems to do this. Space only works, as far as I can
        tell, in the article list and article view. We could probably
        add the feed list, feed info and source view to the list. But I
        think we would have to define our own accelgroup with this
        approach, too, same as with option 3.

Opinions?

-- 
[ Juri Pakaste / address@hidden / http://www.iki.fi/juri/ ]