HUD messes up application's Alt key bindings

[IRIE Shinsuke]

If Alt-key is assigned to HUD, Alt key doesn't work correctly in some applications.

For example, Blender doesn't accept Alt key press at all. See a bug report in Blender bug tracker for detail:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=33831&group_id=9

When pressing Alt key, Blender receives unnecessary FocusOut and FocusIn events, so Blender immediately forgets the Alt key is pressed down. Blender developer was very angry with Unity's such strange behavior.

In Emacs, after select a region, Alt key press sometimes cancels the selection unexpectedly, so I can do nothing in the region.

Unity 6.12.0-0ubuntu0.2
Ubuntu 12.10 amd64

[Edward Donovan (edward.donovan)]

Here's a similar buggy behavior, with a certain kind of dialog:

If you edit a Firefox bookmark from the address bar, a dialog comes up. I guess it's a particular style of window in X, 'cause most dialogs don't behave the same. The bookmark properties dialog includes a button for "Remove bookmark", and Alt+R is the keybinding. But as soon as you hit alt, that dialog goes away, and the HUD comes up.

You might or might not categorize this problem under this bug. Thanks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[IRIE Shinsuke (irie)]

This bug also affects gnome-screenshot.

Alt+PrintScreen key press should take a screenshot of an application window, but the HUD comes up instead.

[IRIE Shinsuke (irie)]

I made a patch for the Blender issue and it was merged upstream, so Alt key works correctly in Blender now:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=127&aid=34039&group_id=9

However, I think Unity's behavior should be corrected to avoid problems in the other applications.

[IRIE Shinsuke (irie)]

Hmm... gnome-screenshot seems to work correctly now.

Sorry, that might have been a hasty conclusion.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[IRIE Shinsuke (irie)]

I made patches for Blender and they were applied upstream r54199 + r54288.
So Blender 2.66 or later works as I expect.

[IRIE Shinsuke (irie)]

This also affects Fcitx, causes a serious problem.

When editing the preedit text, pressing Alt key unwantedly commits the string, so certain keybindings like Alt+A cannot be used.

[IRIE Shinsuke (irie)]

Also confirmed the same problem happens to IBus...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Pete Woods (pete-woods)]

HUD itself has nothing to do with keyboard shortcuts. All the user interaction is part of the unity project.

[era (era)]

"Confirmed" flag was lost in the ping-pong when the tag was moved from unity (Ubuntu) -> hud (Ubuntu) and promptly there flagged as Invalid. If the hud owner's comment is correct, the unity task is the one where it should remain Confirmed.

[Andrea Azzarone (azzar1)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug. We have tried to recreate this on the latest release of Ubuntu and cannot reproduce it. This bug is being marked as Invalid. If you believe the problem to still exist in the latest version of Ubuntu please comment on why that is the case and change the bug status to NEW.”

PS: i tried 3/4 alt shortcuts with blander and they seem to work just fine