Add keyboard navigation to desktop icons

[Clinton H]

Pressing tab does not allow the user to select UI elements. If tab is pressed "Activities" should be selected. Left or right arrow to select items on Activities bar. If tab is pressed again, select top icon on Dock. Press down arrow to navigate down the dock. Press enter to start app. If tab is pressed instead of enter, Desktop icons should be selected.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. The description is not really clear/matching the title. Is your issue about the desktop icons or keyboard navigation in the shell?

[Clinton H (49studebaker)]

Both. Each time tab is pressed, it should cycle through each top bar item, then each dock item, and then finally each Desktop item(icons).

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The intended design to begin keyboard navigation of the panel is Super+F10. This seems to work in 18.04 but not in 20.04. I wonder if/where it broke?

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/KeyboardShortcuts

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Ah it does work once you have an app running...

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/2047

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Also the Ubuntu dock is somewhat navigable via the keyboard. You can launch any given icon according to its position: Super+NUMBER

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Correction: It's Ctrl+Alt+Tab to navigate the panel. And it works.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Ctrl+Alt+Tab has a "Desktop" option in bionic, but it's missing in focal. Probably because upstream has no desktop now.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

From upstream's point of view, this feature already works (Ctrl+Alt+Tab). But we still need a gnome-shell Ubuntu task here to track the reintroduction of the Desktop into that list, which would be a distro patch.

[Ishrak (irik77587)]

Menu key or application key not working on desktop

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

It looks like we forgot to get version 47 into Ubuntu 22.10 before feature freeze :(

[Sergio Costas (rastersoft-gmail)]

Oh... :-(

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng - 46+really47-1

---------------
gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng (46+really47-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release (LP: #1998084)
    - Add keyboard navigation to desktop icons (LP: #1855711)
    - Fix rubberband with margins like top bar or dock (LP: #1971055)
  * Use debian/watch to mangle the upstream version to lessen version skew
    if this extension is merged into gnome-shell-extensions later
  * Drop desktopGrid and metadata patches: applied in new release
  * Depend on gir1.2-gnomeautoar-0.1 instead of file-roller & xdg-desktop-portal
    (Closes: #1010810)

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Wed, 14 Dec 2022 16:50:12 -0500

[Sergio Costas (rastersoft-gmail)]

This is fixed in the upstream version; as soon as it's ported to Ubuntu, it will work.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

My previous comment was more for gnome-shell because Ctrl+Alt+Tab is missing the Desktop option since nautilus-desktop was retired.