Deskbar menu shortcut is not available on all keyboards

[bitigchi]

Current Deskbar menu shortcut is the "Menu" key. However this key is not available on all keyboards.

• There is no menu key on any Apple keyboard.
• There is no menu key on old keyboards. I use a Model M, and I don't have this key. Not all compact mechanical keyboards have this key as well.
• "Menu" key is meant to open the context menu by design. Although it suits to have it launch the Deskbar menu, still not a good choice.

Windows/Super key on PC systems, Command key on Mac systems should display the menu instead.

[pulkomandy]

I see many reasons to not change this:

Window key is used for stack and tile. It is the "window management" key.

It is well known that having the windows key pop the start menu on windows is super annoying, gamers tipycally remove it altogether from their keyboards, for example, because it is too easily reachable.

Additionally, the layout for keyboards with an Alt Gr key is currently very confused:

• Left Window = Right Alt Gr = "Option"
• Right Window = Left Alt = "Command"

So, Alt Gr (which is used to reach several important chars such as \, {, €, ...) would pop up the Deskbar menu, which of course isn't acceptable.

Stack and Tile is more important than reaching Deskbar menu, because there is no alternative to using a keyboard key for it. So, the Menu key, which may indeed be missing, is better used for reaching Deskbar, for which there is an easy alternative using the mouse. And the more commonly available "window" key is used for Stack and Tile.

Also, if your Model M has no menu key, it probably also has no Windows key.

You can easily swap keys around in the keymap preferences to suit your keyboard if it's missing keys. Just move the "menu" mapping to any other key you prefer using.

We could also consider an extra shortcut (command + escape as on windows?) to open the Deskbar menu.

[bitigchi]

On my Mac, with standard configuration, both CMD and OPTION keys activate Stack & Tile. Even if I swap the Menu button with something else, it doesn't open the menu on my VM, have no idea why (even if I see it activate upon press on Keymap preferences). For Macs, it would make sense to set a different keyboard shortcut, like CMD+Space or ESC as you mentioned, in either case it's not intuitive to use Haiku with a Mac keyboard.

[pulkomandy]

Sadly the keyboard shortcuts are not intuitive in any case currently. The names we use don't match what's written on the keyboard, on mac nor on PC. There are proposals to try to match the displayed name with what's printed on the key, but then it becomes a problem for the documentation (which can't know how the key is named on your particular setup).

The menu key may not be mapped properly (mapped to the keycode and ignoring the keymap), that would be a bug.