[TxMt] Re: disable new behavior in contextual menu for snippet selection - possible?

[Steve King]

Allan Odgaard wrote:
> No, 1-9 “breaks” exactly to promote the “type to select” (which  
> has always worked, and we even do special tricks e.g. in the  
> Subversion bundle to have D choose the most likely Diff action etc.).
>   

Wow. I can't imagine what Apple is thinking. It works great if your
pop-up menus are all unique within the first few letters, but usually
they're not. I assume that a "pop-up" includes things like the
right-click (control-click if you're using a button-challenged mouse)
context menu. Pick a common app, like Safari. Right-click an image.
There are 14 menu items, with names such as "Open Image In New Window"
and "Open Image In New File". You have to type 15 characters to get to
the first unique one! And heaven help you if you make a typo or pause
for a second.

In fact, I can't think of a single instance in which this could save
keystrokes and make menu selection faster. TextMate included. I find the
new command-# scheme awful considering how much finger-gymnastics we
already have to go through to enter a keyboard command. I mean, I have
to type ctrl-shift-option-{whatever} to open the menu, then switch to a
different modifer to actually select something? Madness.

If Apple's going to enforce this I guess there's not much you can do.
The command-# scheme is as good as you're going to get. But overall this
change is just going to lead to developers giving us menus that are
artificially unique in the first few characters, such as "1-Do This",
"2-Do That", "3-Do the other".  I don't think this is really what Apple
is shooting for.

> All change is hard, so give it a few days, but after that, do let me  
> know if it is more bother to use the modifiers.
>   

I'll be able to live with the new way, but I can't imagine that there's
any chance I'll ever come to prefer it. Any way you slice it it's just
more keystrokes.

-- 
Steve King
Sr. Software Engineer
Arbor Networks
+1 734 821 1461
www.arbornetworks.com <http://www.arbornetworks.com/>

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