unity-design team mailing list archive

[Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 15/04/12 03:55, Michael Hall wrote:
> Alt is already strongly associated with accessing a window's menus, it 
> makes sense as the activation key for HUD (except for emacs users, 
> evidently) Michael Hall mhall119@xxxxxxxxxx 
I changed my HUD key to alt+super because if you are in a full screen 
virtualbox VM and you want to get to the menu of an application in the 
virtual machine and press alt then the HUD of the host steals focus and 
pops up over the virtual machine guest.
This is bug 806255 which has been fixed and reverted and now probably 
won't get fixed in Precise at all.
I think the idea of using a meta key to do something that isn't meta is 
a bad idea, it just causes problems. Alt should modify the action of the 
keypress you are combining with it, not do something itself. Super 
brings up the dash, alt-Super brings up the HUD which is dash-like but 
alternate.
Personally I would like the default HUD key to be alt+Super, it is easy 
to press and it doesn't cause the litany of problems we have had with 
the single alt key press.

Alan.

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