Pop up the Lister Layouts Context menu by a Global shortcut?

Help & Support
1

Guess the subject says it all, but is it possible to pop up the Lister Layouts Context menu by a Global shortcut?

I'm basically looking for the quickest way to go to a specific lister layout without using a mouse.

Thanks
Atli

2

At the moment Opus isn't very good at creating pop-up menus that open on hotkeys. (Unless you are in a lister and just using a hotkey to open one of the existing menus or context menus, which works fine.)

I assume you want a hotkey which you can press when in any application to get a pop-up of layouts that can be used to open a new Opus window.)

There isn't a good way to do this unless you don't mind either:

  • Manually making menu items for each layout, instead of having an automatic list.

or

  • Having the menu stay open until you manually close it via an additional Close button/item.

The problem is that you have to fake a menu by opening it as a floating toolbar that looks and acts like a pop-up menu. Opening it is easy to do, and you can even make it appear where the mouse pointer is to make it a lot like a pop-up menu:

Toolbar NAME=MyMenu STATE=Float POS=mouse

The problem is making it close after you select an item. For most normal commands, you can just add a command to them which closes the toolbar after running the command:

Toolbar CLOSE name=*this

That won't work with a command like Prefs LAYOUTLIST, though, since that doesn't appear on the toolbar but instead automatically generates commands which open each of your layouts. There's no way to alter what those generated commands do in order to make them close the menu, unless you switch to generating them by hand instead.

(Update many years later: Scripting provides a way to pop-up custom menus, which can be useful for similar things.)

3

Thanks Nudel for the reply.

The biggest problem with this solution is that toolbars don't seem to get focus and can therefore not be driven by the keyboard alone... you don't happen to have a solution for that too? :open_mouth:

4

I hadn't noticed that. Yeah, it does make it a bit useless for the keyboard.

I don't think there's any workaround at the moment.

(Update, many years later: You can use state=floatactive for that now. The Toolbar command also now has an AUTOCLOSE argument that makes it close after the first selection.)