Enable Menu Access Keys was switched back on without my request

[Nick Moffitt]

Somehow in the last update (as of ~08:30 BST) my gnome terminal re-acquired the "Enable Menu Access Keys (Such as Alt+F to open the File menu)" option. I had to hunt around for a while to figure out how to shut it off again. This is a nasty surprise, as well as a terrible default: terminals are meant to send your keystrokes to remote applications, and gobbling them up locally is unhelpful.

For example, Alt+F is actually "move forward by word" in any terminal application using GNU Readline, as well as in Emacs and possibly nano. It is expected by users that alt+key combinations will be sent to the terminal-using application in some form.

As an aside, this kind of bug is why I gave up on using Emacs nearly 20 years ago: one of the terminals I had access to ate ^S locally for terminal flow control, so the command combination to save a buffer locked up my session and lost my work. I lost three important edit sessions before giving in and permanently switching to vi. This kind of behavior can be disastrous for people!

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: gnome-terminal 3.0.1-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.19-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Oct 5 08:53:09 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
ProcEnviron:
 LC_COLLATE=C
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-04 (0 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Uwe Stuehler (ustuehler)]

I agree with Nick. It is essential that menu shortcuts can be disabled in order to deliver Alt+<x> key combinations to the process running in the terminal. It used to be possible to disable "Show Menubar" to that effect, but with Unity and the external application menu (UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=libappmenu.so), at least in Ubuntu 11.10, the "Show Menubar" option has no effect at all.

[Uwe Stuehler (ustuehler)]

I overlooked the "Enable Menu Access Shortcuts" setting in the "Keyboard Shortcuts" dialog. Now that I found it, it does seem to work (for me) and is remembered across terminal sessions. I was used to using the "Show Menubar" option to control this behavior, however.