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</pre>
 
</pre>
  
Take that you stupid gnome.
+
Take that you stupid gnome!  But unfortunately it doesn't change anything about the eclipse behavior.  They must've hard-coded it.
  
 
[http://justinrudd.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/i-miss-eclipse/#comment-4274 This guy] says he somehow managed to change the mapping, too.
 
[http://justinrudd.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/i-miss-eclipse/#comment-4274 This guy] says he somehow managed to change the mapping, too.

Revision as of 12:33, 7 February 2008

This one is particularly glaring. The Eclipse IDE has a preference pane where you can set key mappings. You can map F10 to whatever you like, but... it will always pop down the File menu! No matter what else you map it to!

the bug

My comments on Bugzilla about that:

I don't care if some GTK developer capriciously decided that F10 ought to pop down some menu in every application. This is terrible for usability! F10 is not a memorable keystroke! Control-W to close a window is memorable; Control-F to Find something is memorable. All 12 of those non-descript function keys should be available for application-specific behavior, and applications like Eclipse that ostensibly allow you to change the custom key assignments for every function, ought to be able to actually work that way. (The only way the lack of memorability will be solved is when the F keys have little displays in them to show what they will do in a particular context. e.g. the Optimus keyboard) F keys have been a chafing point ever since WordPerfect for DOS back in the 1980's, if not before. (But nobody is arguing to just accept the WordPerfect standard these days, are they? despite how many people had to memorize that one.) Deciding on global standards for what the F keys will do is NOT the answer. If they were physically labeled with specific functions on every PC keyboard in the world, like e.g. the old Sun keyboards have keys for "help" and "search" and so on, that would be different; but they are not.

I want my F10 to be "step over" because of years of muscle memory, dammit! I have been using Linux since about 1994 and this is the first time I've EVER heard of F10 being reserved for the File menu. And Visual Studio is not the only IDE which maps F10 to "step over", either.

I don't mind if Eclipse ships with this obtuse mapping by default, but since I can remap F10 in the preferences, I very much expect it to actually obey this preference after it has been set. And I refuse to believe that would be impossible to implement.

...end of comments

Well here is a possible workaround:

[localhost][12:23:18 PM] gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_accel
F10

[localhost][12:23:58 PM] gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_accel "ctrl-shift-m"

[localhost][12:24:14 PM] gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_accel
ctrl-shift-m

Take that you stupid gnome! But unfortunately it doesn't change anything about the eclipse behavior. They must've hard-coded it.

This guy says he somehow managed to change the mapping, too.