Mac OS accelerator keys

[John Ralls]

> On Sep 12, 2017, at 5:30 AM, Deva - <pobox.deva at outlook.in> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am running Gnucash v2.6.6 on Mac OS Sierra.
> 
> This is in response to an earlier post clarifying how to setup keyboard access to frequently performed functions by Christopher Lam (see below). I couldn’t find a way to respond to that specific thread from my daily digest mail, hence this.
> 
> I presume that post was about a windows fix. On my Mac, I found a similar file called osx_accel_map under /Applications/Gnucash/Contents/Resources/share/gnucash/ui.
> 
> I edited the file (after making a backup of the original file) for the 2 lines mentioned in the earlier post, but instead of "<Primary>j" and "<Primary>l”, I changed it to “<Meta>j” and “<Meta>l” based on other such entries in the file.
> 
> I restarted gnucash after these edits, but these accelerator keys don’t seem to work on an open register. I tried pressing both <CTRL> as well as <COMMAND> for the <Meta> key, but with no effect - nothing happens.
> 
> Can you please let me know how I can set this up for a Mac?

Deva,

The file you want to edit is ~/Library/Application Support/Gnucash/accelerator-map. The one in the bundle is obsolete and not used.

<Primary> means “Command” on Mac and “Control” everywhere else. <Meta> means “Alt”; on a Mac that’s the Alt/Option key. (The history about that is that I had a spirited discussion with Mitch Natterer of The GIMP about how to map control to command. <command> isn’t a modifier key in Gtk. I wanted to map command to meta, but Mitch insisted that <Meta> should be Alt/Option to be consistent with Linux and Win32. He solved the problem rather elegantly by inventing <Primary>. Shortly after that Mike Alexander improved my accelerator map code in GnuCash to not use osx_accel_map but didn’t remove it in case it might prove useful.)

Regards,
John Ralls