firefox - Pentadactyl: how to disable menu bar toggle by <Alt>?

07
2014-07
  • deeenes

    Using Pentadactyl, when I press the Alt key, it toggles the menu bar, and the --MENU-- mode. This is very embarrassing for me, as I use dwm window manager at the same time, where Alt is the most important meta key, so I hit it very often. How can I disable Pentadactyl's behaviour? I mean, I want it to do nothing when I press Alt. I already tried to remap Alt or Meta to nothing:

    :map <A> <Nop>
:map <M> <Nop>

    But it doesn't work.

    • Answers
  • deeenes

    Actually recently this is the normal behaviour of Firefox. Recently, because few versions earlier it was not like this. And using extensions like Pentadactyl or Vimperator, it is very apparent and annoying, while possibly with the default user interface it's convenient. So I searched for related Firefox settings, and I found, the ui.key.menuAccessKey and ui.key.menuAccessKeyFocuses. First I had the intuition that the first needed to change, which was set to 18, which means the Alt key. I set it to 0, without any effect. Then I changed the latter, from true to false, and the issue become resolved.


    • Related Question

    keyboard shortcuts - Disable the activation of the menu bar when Alt is pressed in Windows 7
  • mjsr

    In Windows 7 how can I disable the function that activates the menu bar when Alt is pressed?

    Are there some registry values to modify this behaviour?


    • Related Answers
  • KCotreau

    The answer is no. How could they do that? If they did that, and someone disabled it, they would cut people off from very necessary menu items. It would be a nightmare.

    The only thing you can do is live with that, or activate the menu permanently by clicking Organize>Layout>Menu bar.

  • Fuhrmanator

    I found this question because I have a new keyboard and sometimes accidentally hit the ALT key when typing emails in Gmail. The focus is lost and any following keystrokes are passed to my browser (which can have very annoying results sometimes).

    The best solution I found, which is an improvement but not perfect, is with a keymapper program called KeyTweak, which as far as I understand, changes the registry.

    In the program, you map Left Alt to Right Alt, and Right Alt to Left Alt. This allows the Alt functions to still work somewhat (Ctrl-Alt-Delete). However, Alt-Tab is partially broken (at least on my Windows-7). It allows you partially to move to the other applications, but when you release the Alt key, the "selection" of the next application isn't made (you can make it with a mouse-click, however).

    It's too bad Windows doesn't have something to prevent loss of focus from errant Alt presses. The Shift and Ctrl keys don't have that effect, for example.

  • surfasb

    This one is interesting. I don't know of any programs besides Autokey. Or just end up writing a program. But no registry setting. That would break TONS of programs.

  • gaborlenard

    I've been using AutoHotkey already, so I added this line to my script and it fixed this annoying behavior in almost all applications:

    ~LAlt Up:: return

    It doesn't work in IE but I don't use IE anyway. :)

    BTW, I also killed the annoying start menu popup via:

    ~LWin Up:: return
~RWin Up:: return