Hello,

I do not know the proper nomenclature for this feature, so please bear with me while I attempt to describe it.

Using the KDE (3.9.5) application launcher in "Classic Menu" style, certain entries have underlined letters, which provide a quick means of typing that letter to access the application. This feature uses the first letter preferentially (the "K" in "K3b", for example), but if that first letter is already being used, another letter will be chosen, (the "P" in "KDE Partition Manager").

Is there a way to disable this function, and instead have the entries follow consecutively?

For instance, in the example given above, hitting "K + Enter" would start K3b, but hitting "K" twice ("K + K + Enter) would start "KDE Partition Manager".

This would be a lot more useful to me, because adding and changing menu entries can change the underlined access letter, forcing me to relearn all of the access keys. If it was based on a sequential logic, I would still be able to use the same letter, regardless of new entries, I would just have to learn to press the key an additional time, for instance.

Thanks for any help on this problem.

These keys are called "accelerators" and to the best of my knowledge they are automatically setup by parts of KDE. I am not sure if it is possible to change how they behave to what you are requesting unfortunately. To the best of my knowledge the code does not support it...

Thanks cooks, at least I know they are called accelerators now.

mnemonics

QKeySequence should support emacs style shortcut combos, but the GUI setters don't.
No idea whether that's already been fixed for frameworks ("kdelibs notfive") but you could file a bug report for it.

The auto-accelerators would afaics however have to be changed in Qt (iff this is applicable, this is)

I could use mnemonics, or just straight memorization for that matter, but it keeps changing when applications are added or removed, then there is the issue of different key sequences for different installations of KDE-enabled systems (I currently have six of them on this machine).

I think what I was (am) hoping for is a way to disable the accelerator feature in the application launcher, using instead the first letter of the menu entry in the application launcher. With this scheme, Konqueror could always be selected by pressing "K" a sufficient number of times (followed by Enter), instead of "O" or "Q" or "K" or "R", which is how it works now.

mnemonics is what these underscores are called

You're asking for a very particular inputhandling that will have to be implemented by the client or in Q/KMenu (pressing a key leading to the next entry with that char at the beginning) -> file a wish to the launcher or Qt (for Qt5)
This behaviour is not generically provided.

Okay, thanks lueb. I was hoping this would be a more simple change, along the lines of setting a check box, but alas, 'tis not to be. I don't think it's worth recoding the way it works, as I don't think there is much demand this this behavior (let along many of us left who use the "classic menu" setting), even though it would have been more familiar to the way I'm used to the launcher behaving.

I do certainly appreciate understanding now what is involved in this issue, and I have marked this as acceptable to reflect this. Thanks!