I just discovered that many Gnome dialog boxes do have keyboard shortcuts to reach controls or tabs with Alt+letter — only they are not displayed. The shortcuts do appear in the form of an underlined letter when I hold Alt down.
How can I make the shortcut letter always underlined, so that the shortcuts are discoverable? Same question for menu items, by the way.
What I see normally:
What I see with Alt held down, and I want to see all the time:
I found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10103922/gnome-3-always-show-altx-keyboard-shortcuts, which suggests adding gtk-auto-mnemonic = 0
to ~/.gtkrc-2.0
for Gnome 2 and dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/automatic-mnemonics false
for Gnome 3. Neither seems to have any effect in my session though.
In Ubuntu 12.04, in my sessionafter setting automatic-mnemonics
to false, shortcut letters still don't appear unless I hold Alt down (I tried in pavucontrol, evince and gnome-control-center). I start my session from Lightdm and I am not running a Gnome session. My window manager is Sawfish. I do have a D-Bus daemon, and other dconf settings take effect immediately (e.g. /org/gnome/desktop/background/draw-background
). If I start another session with startx
on the same machine, the change of automatic-mnemonics
is not reflected. However, if I run a default (Unity or Gnome) session in a different account, automatic-mnemonics
takes effect immediately.