Windows magic auto-accelerator evil ?

[Kohei Yoshida]

On 01/24/2013 12:50 PM, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> Quite a while ago we added code to add mnemonic's to "ok"/"cancel"
> buttons if the translation/english didn't have them
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=58f16ff09672f3e37156d0fc5e79e310b2c49c08
> but...
> // Windows (apparently) has some magic auto-accelerator evil around
> // ok / cancel so add this only for Unix
>
> do you remember what the evilness was ?

On Windows, the OK and Cancel buttons automatically get highlighted and 
are mapped to Enter and ESC buttons without us settings accelerators. 
In fact, Windows apps don't add accelerators to OK and Cancel buttons at 
all, and adding them would make the buttons look weird on Windows.

> I ask because the catch is that adding accelerators to e.g. CJK/Indic
> strings gives something that can't be pressed on a keyboard (gaze in awe
> at the MnemonicGenerator::CreateMnemonic code for the dance when adding
> auto-mnemonics to avoid that problem). And the usual thing is e.g.
> translators append ascii " (~O)" to the end of the CJK string for OK.

Yup.  I was also aware of this, especially for the Japanese UI.

> The obvious solution would seem to just change our English "OK" "Cancel"
> button source strings to a simple "~OK"/"~Cancel" which lets us remove
> the problematic code and shift the selection of a suitable mnemonic back
> to the translations.

But that would put the underscore under the letter O in OK (and C in 
Cancel) for the English UI which is not what we want for Windows.

I remember the "solution" OOo had employed back in the days were not to 
add accelerators to OK and Cancel, which were Okay (no pun intended) on 
Windows but looked weird and was less convenient on Linux.

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc