Hide or deemphasize shortcut keys in menus

At first I was like "say what?!" then I saw your mockups and I have to say they are so refreshing! It's so much easier to look for something in the menu when the keyboard shortcuts are not shown.

Clearly, we cannot simply hide keyboard shortcuts all of the time because many people use keyboard shortcuts and enjoy learning new ones. Maybe we can only show the keyboard shortcut for the highlighted menu entry? Would be worth testing.

This proposal is not good imo.

I only Igree if we hide the shortcuts we all know of Ctrl+S, Ctrl+P, Ctrl+O, Ctrl+F ans so on but the others should remain becuase if you use an application often you don't bother to open menus at all.

Another possible way would be to have an option that shows them and hides them on demand. maybe the best for both side users.

I agree with David, I think in the general case it will be a lot cleaner and easier on the eyes.

As long as the underlines are shown when pressing alt, and the shortcuts are shown when hovering the item, I don't think any discoverability is lost.

DS - Thanks for looking into this bug! I proposed it upstream, and the main concern was over 'keyboard only users'. Now, I don't know any keyboard-only users, but I suppose they must be considered. I think the idea of only showing them when there is highlighting is a great idea and would love to try that out. What component actually codes for that - is that in GTK?

Dilomo - that is what I was proposing, not that we remove them entirely, simply that we make them discoverable.

One issue in Rich Jones' mockup is that gtk currently does not work that way.
If the shortcuts are not displayed the menu will become thinner/narrower. Check out the session menu.

The fix is in no way a simple/easy one.

The upstream bug report is for this issue , and the suggestion was to make the shortcuts lighter.

Fun trivia: Maemo (used on Nokia N810, N900, etc) hides shortcut text when the keyboard is closed, shows it when the keyboard is open.
Windows does similar stuff with the mnemonics (which are indicated by underlines): they are only shown when Alt is being pressed, then some newer applications produce more colourful and obvious overlays (indicating all the shortcuts) to make it easier to interact that way.

I don't think we can do all that here, but I have an alternative suggestion: use Pango markup to italicize, grey out or shrink that shortcut text. Gets it out of the way, emphasizes that the shortcuts are _alternatives_, but doesn't harm any existing functionality.

That's at least a step in the right direction!

From upstream:
http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=149582

Much nicer, themeable, customizable (haters like me would be able to make them invisible with theming :) )

Following upstream's assessment of this (in gnome bug 604315), I am adding human-gtk-theme to the bug report. It is possible to style the GtkAccelLabel to achieve the desired effect. Here is Moblin doing it: http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=151627

May be worth discussing on the ubuntu-art mailing list. May be worth implementing the adjustment in a non-default theme (in the community-themes package) in order to test the waters and get the ball rolling :)

Assigning Ken on the paper cut task just so he can take a look.

the issue is fixed in lucid

Actually the fix released was for Bug #403691 , which has been fixed in gtk.

This bug was closed upstream by the reporter since the gtk devs didnt like the idea , instead the idea was implemented in clearlooks and mobilin engines.

This has now been fixed. Not really sure where though! My best guess is in the murrine engine.
If anyone else knows where , re-assign as appropriate.

I still see shortcut in all menu (firefox, gedit, nautilus etc.)
Lucid Linx 10.4, ambiance theme (but same with radiance and other themes)
Where I'm wrong??

Same as neuromancer here.

The screenshot is from running murrine version: 0.90.3+git20100601-0lucid1 .

Both Lucid and Maverick have a less recent version of Murrine: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk2-engines-murrine

Hmm , right thats the murrine update!
Just think of it as a sneak peak of the Maverick theme! :D

We need the latest murrine for this fix.

This was fixed in maverick :

gtk2-engines-murrine (0.90.3+git20100810-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * New git snapshot

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:24:15 +0200