Keyboard based navigation

[KAGEYAM4]

It would be awesome if it would be possible to control kando fully using only keyboad and no mouse involved. It can be useful in coding and other activities where one dosen't want to interact with mouse.

rofi like applications can be used but the versatile nature of kando, its looks, its animation, really hope it wold be possible.

From user side i can only think of this , one key to activate kando, 8-keys for directional navigation, 2-keys to go to previous/forwad in pie menu.

[Schneegans]

Hi there! Thanks for the suggestion. However, this has a very low priority for me. Once upon a time, I implemented this functionality for Gnome-Pie and this is extremely inefficient. The eight-key idea does not really work as you can have any number of menu items per level. So we would need to use the arrow keys and hence you have to press multiple keys in order to navigate to a specific item.

With your mouse, you can select an item three levels deep (an item in a submenu of a submenu of the menu root) in well below a second. With the keyboard, this will be more like 5 - 10 seconds.

Alternatively, we could assign a number to each item. When you press the number, the corresponding item is selected. This is much faster but also not very intuitive and thus pretty hard to learn.

After all, Kando is designed to be used with gestures. IMHO, any type of keyboard navigation will feel pretty awkward...

[KAGEYAM4]

Hi there! Thanks for the suggestion. However, this has a very low priority for me. Once upon a time, I implemented this functionality for Gnome-Pie and this is extremely inefficient. The eight-key idea does not really work as you can have any number of menu items per level. So we would need to use the arrow keys and hence you have to press multiple keys in order to navigate to a specific item.

With your mouse, you can select an item three levels deep (an item in a submenu of a submenu of the menu root) in well below a second. With the keyboard, this will be more like 5 - 10 seconds.

Alternatively, we could assign a number to each item. When you press the number, the corresponding item is selected. This is much faster but also not very intuitive and thus pretty hard to learn.

After all, Kando is designed to be used with gestures. IMHO, any type of keyboard navigation will feel pretty awkward...

Yes now that i see your point it seems hard.

---

What do you think about this, i got this idea from Vimium - Firefox extension. Here's a screenshot -

So maybe we can improve on this, like only showing initial letter of menu items instead of two.

So here is a scenario ->

1. Kando will be launched using some hotkey-combination. It wont close itself unless a menu-item is selected or esc key is pressed or maybe later some other implementation.
2. every item will have a one-letter associated with it - this letter can be first letter of menu item. In case where a menu has two items with same letter maybe user can manually reasign the item some other letter.
3. User can press the letter to navigate to the item (wether the items get executed or selected : can be user choice - )

Also the kando-theme can be designed in some way to accomodate letters in a good way so it dosent look that bad as this screenshot. And the letter-hints will only show if kando is launched with a flag so that when using mouse it wont get in the way of looks.

---

Let's keep this issue open, maybe we will get some good ideas from others in future.

[Schneegans]

Yeah, this was also possible in Gnome-Pie. In fact, I implemented some kind of fuzzy search. So when a menu was open, you could press letters on your keyboard and Gnome-Pie would highlight the item which most closely matches. So for instance typing "ffox" or something would most likely highlight an item called "Firefox". Then you could press Enter to select the highlighted item.

Item labels are something different which may come in the future but shouldn't be part of this issue. In Fly-Pie, item labels do exist as well.