Alt key for menu

[dropbeardevs]

Hi all, I grew up with EDIT.COM back in the DOS days and I'm super excited about this project. It's looking good so far!

Please delete if this is a duplicate, but I noticed that the Alt key doesn't work in selecting a menu, which is a part of my muscle memory.

If this hasn't been assigned to anybody yet, I'm more than happy to work on it.

[lhecker]

Unfortunately, the VT protocol doesn't support key events for just modifier keys alone. I believe even the kitty keyboard protocol doesn't support this.

The reason this worked in DOS is because console applications practically had direct keyboard access. VT applications (UNIX style - like this application) however consider modifier keys to only modify the base character. The control key for instance literally masks out the top 3 bits of the key you press which is why Ctrl+C is the same as the byte 0x03 in ASCII. This is also why they're called modifier keys and why they require another "base" key to be pressed simultaneously.

Because of this, this editor unfortunately will not support this feature. 😢

[kovidgoyal]

Just FYI the kitty keyboard most definitely supports it.

kitty kitten show-key -m kitty

and press the alt key and see that you get press and release events for it.

[dropbeardevs]

@lhecker Thank you for getting back to me about this. Total sadness with not being able to use Alt :(

How about F10? I seem to remember some early DOS programs, such as Microsoft Word using F10 to open a menu. And I just tested - even Chrome opens with F10 still!

[rhubarb-geek-nz]

Back in the day, IBM CUA was the user interface specification du jour, for console programs we used CUA-89.

Indeed F10 is listed as "Menus are activated/deactivated".

[dropbeardevs]

@rhubarb-geek-nz Oh yeah, didn't OS/2 use F10 to access menus?

[rhubarb-geek-nz]

Indeed it did. Coming from 16-bit Windows I was used to F3 doing a "Find Again" but OS/2 with CUA closed the window instead!

[lhecker]

Oh, I didn't know that F10 did that! I'll reopen the issue so we can add support for that.