Dan Ingalls wrote:
> 
> 4585MenuFromKeyboard-di-sw -- Dan Ingalls and Scott Wallace -- 2 December 2001
> This changeSet introduces keyboard control of menus in morphic.
> First of all, there is now the ability to move the selection up and down using arrow keys in any menu, and to confirm with CR or cancel with ESC, and to pass control into a sub-menu with right- or left- arrow (and to return back with ESC).
> That's not all.  If you type in a menu, it builds a pattern string, which appears at the bottom of the menu.  Whenever the pattern is not empty, only items that match are presented.  If only one item matches the pattern (or in any menu with only one item), the option is given to confirm with CR or cancel with ESC.
> But wait, there's more...  In most contexts, hitting ESC now brings up the world menu, (and, of course, hitting ESC again will make it go away again).  This enables all sorts of TECO-like incantations such as
>         '<ESC>d q<CR>' which would, of course, invoke 'save and quit', or
>         '<ESC>he<CR>spa<CR>' to show the amount of free space.
> [A free bottle of Ripple will be awarded to the first Squeaker to successfully perform majorShrink on a computer with no pointing device].
> Finally, two cosmetic tweaks are also included:
>         1.  The selection in a menu is now shown slightly darker than before, and
>         2.  Menus indicate keyboard focus with a thin green border (useful with arrow control).

Cool stuff!

We're almost all the way to supporting keyboard-only operation of the UI. (at least the traditional SystemWindow/menu portion of the UI)

Not that I'd willingly give up using the mouse, but it'd be nice to be able to support mouseless operation.

About the only other things we'd need would be to be able to bring different windows to the fore with the keyboard (someone wrote a goodie to do this long ago), and to be able to switch keyboard focus between different panes within a SystemWindow.  Perhaps ctrl-tab or ctrl-arrow or similar could do this pane switching.

(Although I guess we'd also need a stronger form of sticky keyboard focus to support this, similar to what Steve Swerling submitted.)

Also, I tend to agree with Daniel Vainsencher that it would be more useful for the ESC key to bring up the local list/editor pop-up menu inside a list/text morph, rather than the World menu.  Maybe Shift-ESC or something else could bring up a World menu everywhere.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com