Global menu: can't get keyboard shortcuts (accelerators) to work

I’ve just installed MATE under Ubuntu 18.04 via the ubuntu-mate-desktop route. I’m loving it! One problem I’m having is that when I have the global menu activated (e.g., when using the Contemporary layout), the alt-key keyboard shortcuts for the menu don’t work (alt-f for file, etc.) They work fine when not using a global menu. Can anyone help? Is there some tweak or setting I’ve missed?

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Hi @Vultan, I did some testing and here’s my results

It fails to work on Firefox, Thunderbird or any Office app like Writer and Calc. To add insult to injury the letters are underlined, too.

It does work here on MATE apps like Caja, Pluma and Terminal. It also works on Transmission and GDebi.

Do you see this same pattern? I don’t use the Global Menu but anything hindering keyboard shortcuts gets my interest. :slight_smile:

@vkareh is a developer that’s done good work in this area. I have a feeling he has some insight.

Hi @Bill_MI, thanks for confirming this. At least I know to stop looking for the buried option to enable the shortcuts. I can confirm I’m seeing (almost) the same behavior, in that the shortcuts don’t work for me on Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice; but they do work on Caja, Pluma, and Terminal. The only difference I see is that I don’t see the underlines under the letters; they aren’t shown. Well, to be more specific, when I first switch to a view with global menus (i.e. Contemporary), the letters are underlined, but after switching windows a few times, the underlines go away.

Should I file this as a bug somewhere? I’m new to the MATE community, so if there’s a best practice for doing so, I’d love to know.

At the very top of these community pages lies the Bug Tracker link for Ubuntu-MATE.

The MATE desktop, popular on many distros, has its own issue tracking.

I did a quick search of both places but see nothing already posted.

I probably didn’t run long enough to see those underlines disappear. I did my testing in a virtual machine.

Sounds good, I’ll file a bug report. Thanks for the help.