Minor issue: When Alt+f opens the file menu, should the 5th entry be close, with small c, not Close with a capital C?

YjRk · February 25, 2023, 11:33pm

Can you confirm, deny, or comment about the following?

With writer, and some document open, and an English keyboard, when pressing Alt+f I can see the File menu. The 5th entry from the top in that menu is Close. To close opened the document. The word Close in the menu has short bar under the letter C. I thought the short bar hints that a shortcut of C, capital C, can be used instead of a mice click on the Close word. To my surprise, the shortcut is c, a lower letter c, not a capital C. Which, in my opinion, is acually better, as it is more convenient. Do you think there is a minor bug, which is the menu should present the word close (with small c), not Close (with capital C)?

EarnestAl · February 26, 2023, 12:04am

Typically, Windows doesn’t differentiate between lower or upper case. Probably both work, I’ve never tried using the upper case letter in the past 35 years due to laziness

YjRk · February 26, 2023, 12:43am

With Linux, Upper case C does not do anything. Lower case c does close the document. Perhaps the behavior depends on the specific Linux distribution. I am also told with Linux the desktop environment, or the window manager, might interfere. Those are much more standardized on MS windows, as basically there is only one.

mikekaganski · February 26, 2023, 5:47am

The mnemonics show you the keys on keyboard that you need to press, not “characters”. “Uppercase” C that you refer to is not key C (which is meant as the mnemonic), but a different combination Shift+C. Don’t confuse these. The upper case of the character is because all the menu items follow the same casing pattern (different for different languages). This also follows the operating system conventions. There is no bug, and no inconsistency.

See Gedit showing capital O and capital S as the mnemonics when pressing Alt, despite not expecting you pressing the Shift when using the keys.

YjRk · February 26, 2023, 8:36pm

It is still a bit confusing. In the past, I tried Shift+c, to get an upper case C close the document. Which did not work. Only by pure chance I tried just the c keystroke, and realized it is working. And the fact that with MS Windows case does not matter does not help to get it right with Linux. In fact, up until now I did not realized that just a lower case c will work with MS Windows. I think both answers given here should be found in the help text. Or is it already there, only that I did not see that?

It could be I will file a request to have such an explanation in the help text. Do you think it should be there? I mean, too long help text is intermediating.

EarnestAl · February 26, 2023, 9:12pm

It is not LibreOffice specific; it is standard computer terminology. For example, Ctrl+C is the written shortcut for the commonly used keyboard combination for Copy, it means press Control Key plus c; it does not mean press Ctrl+Shift+C (previously was Track Changes).

The menu items in various programmes are usually written in Sentence case or with first letters capitalised, almost never all lower case, this is for readability. It can happen in choosing a letter to combine with Alt that it is capitalised but you want the simple combination of Alt + letter. what do you do? change the capitlisation of the menu? it then starts to look odd especially if the rest of menu Starts with Capitals.

mikekaganski · February 27, 2023, 4:23am

Gedit is a Linux (Gnome) application, screenshoted on Ubuntu exactly to show you that it’s not Windows-specific.

Indeed. In the help of the operating system, since the mnemonics are a convention of the operating system; and each program should follow that OS-wide convention. And it would be odd to provide a basic OS learning stuff in the help of each and every program.

However, it is there:

Calling Menus with Mnemonics

Some of the characters shown on the menu bar are underlined. You can access these menus directly by pressing the underlined character together with the Alt key. Once the menu is opened, you will again find underlined characters. You can access these menu items directly by simply pressing the underlined character key.