how to start MATE menu using keyboard?

[TomRoche]

MATE seems more functional than Cinnamon on my older laptop. Cinnamon is definitely prettier than MATE, though, and it has one functional advantage: Out Of The Box the super key causes the Cinnamon menu to popup. How can I get similar functionality from the MATE menu? I'm not seeing keyboard shortcut settings for the MATE menu anywhere (notably, not in Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts).

[Danko8321]

Nope, it is not doable now. With the old MintMenu you could pop the menu by using "Ctrl+Windows" but that no longer works. I'm guessing someone in the Mint Devs has spotted this an it is flagged as a bug, but I'm not really sure. I'll check on LaunchPad and see if I can find anything about it. If it isn't there and it is OK with you, I can start a bug report there.

[TomRoche]

Nope, it is not doable now.

waah!

I can start a bug report there.

thanks! Accessibility is important ...

[corn]

Alt+F1 shows part of the menu.

[Danko8321]

Yup, already register a while back. Look at this.

Hopefully, this bug will be ironed out in for Maya.

[lossfizzle]

Not fixed yet. I love how responsive MATE is compared to Cinnamon but this is a total dealbreaker.

[äxl]

mintMenu through Ctrl+Super_L works for me (mate-desktop.org/Debian Wheezy repositories).
But I think I had to fix this. Had something to do with Gnome taking away the Super key iirc ...

[Monsta]

A little hack to make the global menu hotkey work.

Tested in LMDE, will probably work in Mint 12 too.
Not needed in Mint 13 anymore as there's a new mintmenu-keybinder package.

Also please note that these changes in mintMenu.py will be undone on the next mintMenu update - this is a hack, after all.

[Spencer Flibble]

Not fixed yet. I love how responsive MATE is compared to Cinnamon but this is a total dealbreaker.

I'm really new to Linux, I'm moving across from Windows 7. I've been meaning to switch for a long time. The thing that gave me a big push was when I saw the preview of Windows 8.

Now I'm sure windows 8 with it's Metro interface is fine for a touch screen. It may even work OK with a mouse. The thing is, I really want to use the keyboard for everything. My old Windows Start menu is NEVER activated by pressing the button with a mouse - I hit the Windows key on my keyboard.

I was just amazed that the windows key didn't bring up the menu in the MATE desktop. I'm at the stage of evaluating the different window managers. I kind of like KDE, but it's too heavy and a bit overdone. I like Gnome with Cinnamon, but after playing with MATE for a few hours on a live CD, I knew this was the window manager for me....

Until I found that I have to press two keys at once to get the menu up. Call me fussy, or difficult, or tell me to start using the mouse. I don't mind. But this is a dealbreaker for me too.
I'm going to investigate the "hack" mentioned above and look for other ways to make this work. But despite the fact that I was really excited about MATE about 5 minutes ago, if I can't get this fixed in the next day or two, I'm probably going to use either Cinnamon or KDE.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I know that this wonderful environment is created by dedicated people who give tier time freely. I don't have the skill they do, so I can't fix this myself. It's just that the way I work is totally keyboard-centric in the GUI. I need to have a single button to bring up the menu, then navigate around in the menu with cursor keys. If I can't do that, I won't use this desktop environment. It's as simple as that.

I do want to say though, other than this I think MATE is just fantastic. I love it. I'll be really sad if I can't make use of it and will keep checking back to see when this is fixed.

Thanks !

[ktrls]

Hi Spencer, I don't know if you have changed distribution, on the end. But the solutions seems trivial and simple.

Here the details: viewtopic.php?f=206&t=112152&p=672324#p672324


Bye
Ktrl+S