[TxMt] Re: Letters to disambiguate keyboard shortcuts

[Allan Odgaard]

On 26 Oct 2015, at 1:16, Jacob Carlborg wrote:

> On 2015-10-25 15:16, Allan Odgaard wrote:
>
>> Pressing A-Z already works to select the first item in the menu 
>> starting
>> with that letter.
>
> That does not seem to work properly. Pressing ⌘Y and then B will 
> select "Branches" instead of "Browse Annotated File". For P it will 
> select "Pop Stash" instead of "Pull".

To clarify, with first item I mean the first item in a lexicographically 
sorted list of all the items.

I.e. here “Bra…” comes before “Bro…” and that is why 
“Branches” gets selected.

> One minor disadvantage of the current way that the letters work is 
> that it will only select the command, not execute it.

Or advantage, if you would like to verify that you jumped down to the 
correct item.

FYI this keyboard support is standard menu behavior and not specific to 
TextMate.

>> Personally I wouldn’t be against re-arranging the Git menu so that 
>> it
>> would work better with letter keys, but I fear it would upset a lot 
>> of
>> people who are e.g. used to ⌘Y + 2 for commit, etc.
>
> If it would be possible to add keyboard shortcuts for the menu that is 
> not dependent on the order, the existing order could be preserved for 
> backwards compatibility. That is, it would be possible to use both 
> numbers and letters.

In the Subversion bundle we prefix items that we want to “skip” with 
a hair space (U+200A).

It does give the item a slight indent, but hardly noticable. The problem 
with the zero-width characters are, that they seem to be ignored by the 
“type to select” algorithm.

If you add hairspace to the Branches… menu item then please submit a 
PR as I also occasionally use Browse but never Branches.