Tip: Accessing the Deskbar from the Keyboard

This tip first appeared on Betips.net and has been updated for Haiku.

Contributed by:	David Siefert

Accessing application pull-down menus in Haiku is a bit different from Windows. In BeOS, to activate the menus, hit You could hit Alt+Esc. This no longer works out of the box in Haiku, but you can easily simulate it by assigning /boot/system/Deskbar to a keyboard Shortcut. I assigned the otherwise unused Menu key on my Windows-centric keyboard.

You can navigate across and down through the menus with the usual arrow keys and select an option with ENTER.

This will work with all native apps, even those written in yab, but not in QT or Java apps unless the porter performed some heroic measures. However, many of these apps are actually started with a shell script, and those should work.