SUMMARY Global menu applet is useless with the new panel keyboard focus. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 0. Add Global Menu applet onto a panel, restart some apps that have menus 2. Focus on a panel with Meta+Alt+P shortcut. OBSERVED RESULT As focus shift away from a window to a panel, global menu becomes empty. EXPECTED RESULT Global menu should still display the menu of an application that is in front, in other words, panel should not take away the focus from a window completely like it currently does. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.25.80 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.96.0 Qt Version: 5.15.4 Kernel Version: 5.18.3-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M/PCIe/SSE2 Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Product Name: G752VT System Version: 1.0
Only one thing can have focus at a time. If you focus a panel, then focus is taken away from your app. Since the Global Menu tracks focus, when you focus a panel, it will no longer show menu items for the app. Once you de-focus the panel, focus should return to the app and your Global Menu will once again show menu items for that app. Other than this behavior being unexpected, what exactly is the problem you're experiencing?
Welp, OS X has managed to implement focus in such way that both Dock and top Menu / System tray could all be focused via keyboard, and I don't remember ever having problems with those. In KDE/Plasma currently it is possible to set a shortcut on a Global Menu applet itself and thus directly invoke it (it's really a shame there's no shortcut by default, btw). But that limits you interactions with only one applet on a whole panel. Why limiting yourself, if with the new (and default!) shortcut it would be possible to use all the panel?
But what's the problem if focusing a panel removes focus from the previously-active app? What issue does it cause? What problem are you seeing? What capability have you lost?
> What problem are you seeing? What capability have you lost? > >> renders global menu empty and useless I can't use the global menu with this shortcut. The whole applet, the whole menu is unusable, as it just disappears the moment you focus a panel via new shortcut.
But why is that a problem? When you have the panel focused, you're interacting with the panel. In order to use the global menu for an app, an app has to be focused. Are you saying you want to: 1. Open an app 2. Move focus to a panel using the keyboard 3. While the panel is still keyboard-focused, use the cursor to interact with the global menu for the app from step 1 ?
Yes, and I don't think it's totally unreasonable to expect :)
I have difficulty envisioning how we fix it with rewriting the world regarding how focus is handled (which is not worth the risk), but if you have an idea and want to give it a shot, feel free. FWIW this was always the case even before we added explicit panel focus; when you open Kickoff, it always de-focused the active app and therefore changed the Global menu to show you Plasma's (nonexistent) menu structure.
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/1958
Git commit 6d544e5c7bf4bcb76af12bf8d3b193c6f3bae66b by Fushan Wen. Committed on 06/08/2022 at 14:06. Pushed by fusionfuture into branch 'master'. applets/appmenu: do not update menu when panel gets focus This makes the keyboard navigation work in the appmenu applet. FIXED-IN: 5.25.4 5.26 M +1 -0 applets/appmenu/lib/appmenuapplet.h M +1 -0 applets/appmenu/package/contents/ui/main.qml M +6 -0 applets/appmenu/plugin/appmenumodel.cpp M +5 -0 applets/appmenu/plugin/appmenumodel.h https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/commit/6d544e5c7bf4bcb76af12bf8d3b193c6f3bae66b
Git commit 453403958014ae4cdd0fd24a1116f5808127fc59 by Fushan Wen. Committed on 06/08/2022 at 14:47. Pushed by fusionfuture into branch 'Plasma/5.25'. applets/appmenu: do not update menu when panel gets focus This makes the keyboard navigation work in the appmenu applet. FIXED-IN: 5.25.4 5.26 (cherry picked from commit 6d544e5c7bf4bcb76af12bf8d3b193c6f3bae66b) M +1 -0 applets/appmenu/lib/appmenuapplet.h M +1 -0 applets/appmenu/package/contents/ui/main.qml M +6 -0 applets/appmenu/plugin/appmenumodel.cpp M +5 -0 applets/appmenu/plugin/appmenumodel.h https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/commit/453403958014ae4cdd0fd24a1116f5808127fc59