Keyboard Accelerators / Shortcuts in Context Menu
Created originally on Bitbucket by AKE_maths
It is highly desirable that TortoiseHg context menu has keyboard accelerator / shortcuts defined for each of its commands.
Below is my take on what is desired, why, and what would be required (not much?) to add this:
**Background: **
- On Windows, accelerator keys can be defined for any text command.
- This shows up as an underlined letter
- It is automatically added by the OS by prefixing the letter with an & (this is the mechanism in Visual Studio GUI builder / Resource file listings)
- Example: Instead of Hg Commit, might have Hg &Commit, which would create Hg Commit, where the capital C has an underline.
- Example Result: Right click > C selects the commit option using keyboard only and does not require a mouse.
** Value of Keyboard Accelerators / Shortcuts **
- The value is that one can navigate commands entirely using the keyboard without having to resort to the mouse.
- While this may not be to everyone's taste, many developers become very familiar with keyboard accelerators / shortcuts.
- This becomes a significant speed up on their productivity (mouse moves are much slower than keyboard presses).
** Required / Desired **
- Every context menu command should have an accelerator associated.
- It is OK if the accelerator conflicts with existing windows context menu accelerators -- repeated pressing of the accelerator key cycles the cursor through the commands that share the same accelerator
** Implementation **
- This is something that should (potentially) be very easy:
- ... wherever you have a menu command name, you simply prefix the desired accelerator key in the name with &
(Note: Just did a search -- this may elaborate on Issue 1566 submitted by Anonymous.)