In Windows, OSX, Unity, Gnome3, Xubuntu, when you super (or click) that “start” menu, and begin typing, it searches through your programs by name (or meta) and when you press ENTER, that first filtered program runs. However, with the MATE menu, you search, it filters, and then you have to press up and then ENTER. Why? I am actually running Mint Cinnamon right now (although my setup is similar to MATE) because of this. Please consider making this change. It is difficult to change habit and muscle memory and it is more efficient.
yes - I found that slightly annoying too.
then i installed synapse - and nearly everything can now be accessed by a new shortcut which i assigned to alt-space
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:synapse-core/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install synapse
you don’t even have to type all the letters to start a program, it uses a fuzzy search.
so now if i want to run firefox, for example, alt-space, ff enter.
you can also open files with it, google searches, calculations etc
it won’t do the washing-up though!
I believe someone was looking into “fixing” this.
Thanks @mickey_megabyte. I actually already tried that solution and it does the job. It is just that it cannot be initialized by the super key for some reason. Even if you go in and manually change the config file.
Yes, the super or mod4 seems to be reserved.
It makes sense really - if you had super bound to your menu, then you couldn’t use super in combination with any other key for other shortcuts.
Another annoying aspect of the current implementation of super in the MATE menu is that when you type something in, it’s easy to accidentally hover over something else on your way to select it from the list, which wipes out the list! grr - so i stopped using it, and use synapse full time.
It bit me to, I’ve now trained my muscle memory to hit the down arrow key before hitting Enter.
I’d categorize it as a bug.
While we’re on the subject, another minor MATE menu niggle is that it takes a second or two to come up when you first use it – be nice if it cached the menus in the background when you log in.
YES it does, although it is inconsistent. Usually when first selecting it after a while of not being used.