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Alt key activates Menus


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Bug / Bad application design:

Traditionally in most Windows applications, pressing the Alt key will activate the menu controls on top of the window. This is extremely undesirable when you have tools that depend on the Alt key for their functions. Any short key press of this key or color picking will override the current tool and put the focus on the menus.

How to reproduce:

1) Select the Brush tool

2) Press or Hold Alt (and color pick or don't)

3) You can no longer do anything with the tool until you click once on the canvas or press Escape

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I can't confirm it either. After releasing the ALT key, the brush tool works as it should.

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Same here, I can't confirm this, with either tablet or mouse.

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If the menu gets activated, just press and release the alt key again, and you are back and continue your workflow.

This is by design from Microsoft, nothing to blame on Affinity 

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  • 1 year later...

I actually haven't encountered this issue in Photo or photo persona publisher with the color picker. However, the alt-menu mainly gets in my way while using the move tool in combination with the Alt key to "select behind" an object and then pressing space to pan the canvas, while the menu is still focused.

I have found an AHK solution to disable Alt menu acceleration in Windows. Affinity is unfortunately special in its input handling. While this script seems to completely disable the Alt-menu behavior in other programs, it only inconsistently blocks it in Publisher.

As a workaround... the menu acceleration can be avoided during use of the move tool (without a script) by making sure to press Ctrl-Alt instead of just Alt to "select behind." I wasn't able to replicate this issue with the brush's color picker, and this solution will not work for the brush because Ctrl-Alt is bound to changing brush size.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRld4bVFrpU

 

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  • 4 months later...

I get bitten by this problem all the time. It really kills the joy of painting with AP. Is Affinity working on any kind of solution?

Quote

This is by design from Microsoft, nothing to blame on Affinity 

I have to disagree. Affinity is to blame for limiting the colour picker to the Alt key with no way to rebind it. The menu acceleration feature in Windows is non-optional and there is no good way (that I know of) to turn it off or work around it. Since this is not a new feature (it has been around longer than mouse support), any failure of Affinity's tools to play nice with it is entirely Affinity's fault. 

Any way to correct this oversight would be fine imo. Rebind the colour picker to Ctrl or have an option to disable menu acceleration for Affinity's menus would do the trick. 

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10 hours ago, Engelbert said:

I get bitten by this problem all the time. It really kills the joy of painting with AP. Is Affinity working on any kind of solution?

Many of us here are Windows users, and very few have ever experienced the problem described here. I certainly haven't.

Therefore, I suspect it really is a Microsoft problem, or perhaps you have some other software installed that is causing it. Or perhaps you have a keyboard issue, where when you try to hold the key down the connection is intermittent and Windows thinks you have pressed and released the key even though you think you have kept it pressed.

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