456506 - Context Menus should respond to space bar on OS X

Status: NEW

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Daniel Luz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080922020341 Minefield/3.1b1pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080922020341 Minefield/3.1b1pre

On Mac OS, the space bar is the default key to simulate mouse clicks. So, the most expected way to select a menu item using the keyboard is by pressing the space bar, not the Enter/Return key.

Menu bar items work correctly (presumably because they are handled by the system itself), but context menus don't.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Right-click anywhere which produces a context menu.
2. Focus an option by using the arrow keys or mouse pointer.
3. Press space bar to activate it.
Actual Results:  
Nothing happens.

Expected Results:  
The menu item should be activated, just like when you press the Enter key.

This is actually also the case for GTK apps, though I discovered that completely by accident -- AFAIK, GTK users are used to pressing the Enter key to activate menu items, so it should be less of an issue.

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

Space bar works for menus, but not for context menus.

Comment 2

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Updating summary. I did a quick check and this does work using Safari on 10.5.

Comment 3

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

It probably wouldn't be difficult to fix this ... if we choose to do
so.

The fix would (I suspect) have to be OS-X-specific -- as best I can
tell, Windows and Linux apps don't generally allow the spacebar to
invoke selected items in their context menus (or their regular menus,
either).

I'm tentatively giving this a P3 priority.

(On OS X 10.4.11, Safari and Camino and TextWrangler all also do an
invoke-on-spacebar in their context menus.)

Comment 4

[Daniel Luz]

(In reply to comment #3)
> The fix would (I suspect) have to be OS-X-specific -- as best I can
> tell, Windows and Linux apps don't generally allow the spacebar to
> invoke selected items in their context menus (or their regular menus,
> either).

From my quick tests, GTK does work with the space bar (GNOME 2.24, build date 09/22/2008, from Intrepid Ibex, both with and without editable menu shortcut keys), and Windows (XP SP3) indeed doesn't.

Comment 5

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

This bug's priority relative to the set of other polish bugs is:
P4 - Polish issue that is rarely encountered, and is easily identifiable.

The bug is obvious once you encounter it, but the user population is limited to people who actually hit the space bar when they are in a context menu, which is likely to be very small.