Accelerator keys do not function if menu is opened with mouse click
Submitted by Jason Quinn
Link to original bug (#618135)
Description
The GNOME 2.30 branch has a major problem related to the use of keyboard accelerator keys. Basically, if an application menu is opened by a mouse click, the keyboard accelerators do not function properly if the mouse cursor is left hovering over the menu item. You must move the mouse off the menu bar name and down into the menu bar before the application will perform the action requested by the accelerator key.
For instance, open a gnome-terminal with its menubar. If you click on "File" with the mouse (and leave the cursor over "File"), the menu opens. Now pressing "b" to open a new tab does not do anything. Also pressing "alt" does not show the keyboard accelerators. You must move the mouse cursor into the menu's entries before actions are accepted. This is not how it should work and is very frustrating to users who use the accelerators a lot. (cf. the same scenario using alt-f to open the file menu.)
The change where no accelerator keys are underlined by default occurred at some point after the 2.28.1 branch. This was probably done do "make things prettier" but whoever did it was likely not a big user of the accelerator keys because they would have noticed this problem very quickly.
(I'm not sure this is the right place to report this bug. It was my best guess and if it's wrong, I'm hoping somebody here will know where I should have reported it.)