[Ghoser777]

Okay, here's what I'm thinking. You know how in windows you can just hit the control key and then you can navigate the menus with the arrow keys and select menuItems with the return key? Well, I think MacOSX needs that too. I don't necessarially think it should be on the base builds of OSX (I've seen plenty of windows novi get confused when they accidentally hit the control key and they are magically whisked away to selected menuItems), but I think some power users would appreciate it.

The problem is, I have no idea how to implement it. I can sort of do the pseudo code hand waving, but I'm not good at event handling. I'd be writing the program in Java.

1. User hits control key, he program interprets the event "control" without any other keys as an indication to select the first menu to the right of the apple

2. While the menu/menuItems are slected, arrow keys will be interpreted to mean select one menuItem up, down, or one menu to the left, right.

3. Return activates the selected menu item

4. The mouse is deactivated from having any effect on the menus except when clicked. Then the menus are deselected.

5. Pressing any key-combination besides a return or arrow key results in the menu to be deselected.

Whew. Now if only I could figure out how to do all this.

Thanks in advance,
F-bacher

[Dalgo]

I think that you could probably do that, for a particular app, by subclassing NSMenu and making it recieve a few extra events for the control key etc. If you wanted to make it system wide for Cocoa apps then maybe there is some way that you could statically compile your changes to NSMenu into one object file which you can use to replace the one that program dynamically link to at runtime. I don't know how you'd go about doing that, though.

Of course if you wanted to make changes to Carbon apps then you'd have a lot more trouble since they don't dynamically link a menu class. I have no clue at all how to make any changes to Carbon apps, carbon is not an API that I use.