Strange menu behavior

[sergeresko]

I'm new in FontForge and have faced its non-intuitive style of navigation through the main menu (in both Main window and Glyph window).

1. Entries are highlighted only after being clicked—not when hovered. But if I click an inactive entry in any submenu then entries become highlighted when just hovered.
2. If I navigate with keyboard arrows, when I reach "Tools" which is inactive, I cannot move to another entry as the highlighting gets stuck to the "Tools".
3. I failed to find any hotkey that brings me to the main menu (like Alt+F10 in many programs).

Are (1) and (2) bugs or that's a reflection of unique and inimitable design?

FontForge version 20141230 from ppa:fontforge/fontforge
OS Ubuntu 14.04

[davelab6]

• FontForge uses a totally one-off custom UI toolkit, which draws a lot on the 'classic' MacOS UI. If you click a menubar item and drag down, the highlight is shown. I agree, this should be changed to highlight on hover.
• On MacOS X, in FontView, pressing alt-f does open then File menu! But alt-e does not edit the file menu. That's odd. Similarly in CharView, alt-e and alt-t and alt-i don't work but the others do.
• When I open a menu, I can use the up/down arrows to move the selection up and down, and the left/right arrows to move to adjacent menus or in/out of submenus. But I can't use the menu item keys (that are underlined) to jump the selection to specific items.

I can't get stuck on the Tools because its not inactive for me. Needs more testing.

What do you mean by main menu?

[sergeresko]

Thank you for the answer.

By the main menu I meant exactly the menu that's talked about, i. e. File Edit ... Help in the top of FontView or CharView window.

On Ubuntu I tried all Alt+letter hotkeys—they work nice for both menu and submenu items. However, several of these hotkeys (if pressed in some way difficult to describe) may additionally invoke Unity's HUD, but it's not a fault of FontForge, I believe.

[Clonkex]

Actually if you click on a menu item and then click on a disabled (greyed-out) option, until you close the menu again you will be able to see the highlight working as expected, and additionally be able to hover other menus to switch which menu is open. In other words, once you click on a disabled menu option the menus function as they do in every other normal program.

This of course leads me to believe the lack of hover highlight is a bug.

EDIT: Apparently the highlight was only visible in the older 2017 version I had until about 15 minutes ago. The function is still the same (i.e. after clicking a disabled item, hovering other menus or sub-menus makes them activate as expected) but the highlight is completely non-existent now.