When pressing the hotkey for Show Popup Menu, the menu is displayed at the mouse pointer location instead of at or near the current focus/selection/active window (like it is for Show Listary toolbar and Launch Apps). This is problematic, especially for keyboard users and with multiple monitors, since it will often display far away from the current activity. Can this be fixed? Thank you.
Menus are supposed to be used by mouse. Sorry that this behavior won’t be changed.
Then why is there a dedicated menu key on all keyboards to display the context menu? Why does Explorer, and all well-designed apps, show the menu at the caret/focus/selection when the context menu is shown via the keyboard? And why do you provide a hotkey to show the popup menu? Every feature should be as accessible from the keyboard as the mouse. There’s obviously already logic to position the Listary and launch popups that way, so how difficult could it be to also position the context menu properly as well?
The major reason is that the popup menu is a global menu instead of a context menu of the active app most of the time.
Here is a typical scenario for a mouse user: the user is surfing the web using Chrome, and he needs to browse his working project folder to drag and drop a few files to Gmail. So he simply activates the popup menu using a hotkey and then clicks to open the project folder.
It would be really frustrating for him if Listary shows the menu at the top left corner of Chrome instead of the mouse pointer location:
- He has to move the mouse for an unnecessary long distance to reach the menu.
- The menu has nothing to do with Chrome. It simply opens a new Explorer window with the target folder.
Because menu is the only way to access many important functionalities in these applications (e.g. a context menu extension in Explorer). You have to use the menu even if you prefer the keyboard.
However things are different in Listary. If you like using the keyboard, simply do a search or press a hotkey. They are much faster than using menus.
As shown above, to bring up the menu in most apps (e.g. Chrome).
Exactly, and that’s how Listary is designed. You can get access to all features using both keyboard and mouse. If you like the keyboard, you can search or use hotkeys. If you prefer the mouse, use the menus.
My point is that if you are a keyboard user, there is no need to use menus in Listary at all. Using search and hotkeys is much faster.
If you still have any questions, please let me know.
You can determine if the menu was opened via the keyboard or mouse and handle each scenario appropriately. If you’re using the WM_CONTEXTMENU command, the coordinates are in lParam (coordinates of -1, -1 if opened via keyboard). Otherwise, you can use the GetKeyState API.
I think Listary would be more useable for keyboard users if Commands and Actions capabilities were merged or integrated. For instance, not having to enter Listary search mode to utilize Action hotkeys would be great. Sometimes I will type to select files via Listary, but other times the file I want to operate on will already be selected or I might have used arrow keys to select. Listary hotkeys should operate the same regardless. Since a hotkey for a Command of ‘Copy Paths of Selected Items to Clipboard’ works in both cases, it seems like it should be possible for an Action to work in both scenarios as well. Either that, or extend Commands with all the capabilities of Actions.
Most mouse users use the popup menu as a quick launch bar. They need to be able to get access to it anytime, and then choose a folder or app to open using mouse. In the most common case, for example when they are using apps like Chrome or Firefox, they press the hotkey to bring up the menu first, and then use mouse to select an item. Changing the current behavior would bring inconvenience to the majority of the mouse users of Listary.
Definitely. I’m redesigning hotkey handling in Listary. The first step is to create a centralized place to manage all hotkeys, and merging commands with actions is the next one. Currently my major concern in enabling action hotkeys directly in Explorer is that it may cause some conflicts.