Unable to use any short cuts with "Alt" because this button immediately displays the menu bar in every gui app

[keeganstothert]

The main shortcut I'm concerned with is "Alt-Backspace" on mac deletes just the previous word. That seems to have been remapped to super which itself is mapped to the Ctrl key, This makes it "Ctrl-Backspace" the actual command which is like windows!

[RedBearAK]

@keeganstothert

As a long time user of Kinto I can tell you that the Option key shortcuts with the remapped Alt-on-Super mostly work fine, except for a few apps like Firefox or VSCode where you might need to take some extra steps to get the menu to stop stealing focus.

The main shortcut I'm concerned with is "Alt-Backspace" on mac deletes just the previous word. That seems to have been remapped to super which itself is mapped to the Ctrl key, This makes it "Ctrl-Backspace" the actual command which is like windows!

Yes, on a PC keyboard Alt does move to the physical Super/Meta/Win key (whatever you want to call it). And Super moves onto the physical Ctrl key, so that's correct. Except in terminal apps.

Helps a lot if you give all the relevant information:

• distro
• desktop environment (DE)
• type of keyboard (Apple, Windows/PC, IBM, Chromebook)
• keyboard layout
• which app(s) you're trying to use the shortcuts in
• Exactly which shortcuts aren't working, and how

It's unclear from your post exactly what is going wrong, but if you use the physical Super/Meta/Win key as if it was Option on an Apple keyboard, it should do what you expect from using Option+whatever on a Mac.

There are multiple lines in the config dealing with the "wordwise" shortcuts like Opt+Backspace. That particular shortcut is working just fine for me right now.

[keeganstothert]

It's weird that you lasered in on vscode and firefox as those are pretty much the only apps I've been using. I disabled the menu in both apps and things seem to be working.

it's not clear to me why those specific apps would map the alt key to a function which pulls focus from the input.

[RedBearAK]

@keeganstothert

it's not clear to me why those specific apps would map the alt key to a function which pulls focus from the input.

They both originate primarily from being Windows apps, and then were ported to macOS and Linux, but in Linux they retained the inherited behavior of letting the menu bar steal keyboard focus. That's the standard behavior for Windows applications, where you can tap the Alt key and then navigate through the menu bar menus with the keyboard.

In macOS the shortcut to access the menu bar is Ctrl+F2, thankfully. So Mac apps don't tend to have this kind of problem.

[lewisdaly]

Thanks for the tip! Disabling the menu on Firefox works like a charm :)

[kennethkeim]

This ended up being my solution to the firefox issue (always showing the menu bar to disable the hotkey). Posting here in case it helps someone. Let me know if you guys have a better solution.

[kennethkeim]

Setting to disable menu bar on vs code: "window.menuBarVisibility": "hidden"