Gvim and Alt-F10

[cjsmall]

I'm on Xubuntu 20.04 and using vim 8.1

In gvim, the Alt-F10 key is co-opted to display the File pull-down menu.  I have a series of remapped assignments for all of the function keys.  These all work well for vim in a terminal window, but this single one fails due to this built-in menu assignment.

Is there an easy way to deactivate this so that the Alt-F10 code (<M-F10>) can be assigned to my purpose?

Thanks.

[Tony Mechelynck]

it applies tOn Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 12:31 AM cjsmall

You didn't say which GUI you are using (I'm using GTK3); also, Vim 8.1
is getting a little long in the teeth IYSWIM. Vim 8.2 was released on
12 December 2019 and its latest patchlevel is 8.2.2800. It is
conceivable that one of these two thousand eight hundred patches fixes
your problem; but otherwise, see below.

I'm on openSUSE 15.2 and here, hitting Alt-F10 on a virtual desktop
unmaximizes the top window, no matter which one — it applies to my
browser as well as to gvim. Repeating the action reverses the process.
The Alt-F10 combo doesn't even reach gvim here. OTOH Alt+letter
triggers (in gvim with GTK3 GUI) the menus on the menubar: Alt-F is
File, Alt-E is Edit, Alt-T is Tools, etc. IIUC this behaviour depends
on the 'winaltkeys' settings.
See :help 'winaltkeys'

If you don't want the GUI menus at all, you can disable them by
removing the m flag from the 'guioptions' setting; OTOH, even without
the menus-on-top there is still a separate ways to get the same menus
at the bottom in both gvim and Vim, see
https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Text_mode_menus

In my experience, the most portable {lhs} key assignments for mappings
are F2 to F9 and F10 to F12 in both Vim and gvim, and in addition
Shift-F1 to Shift-F12 in gvim. F1 is reserved for Help. F10 may either
be the system menu, or it may be available too. Others might or might
not work for reasons external to Vim.

If when you do
:verbose map <M-F10>
in gvim, the answer is either "No mapping found" or your own defined
mapping, then if gvim does something else when you hit that key combo,
the reason is to be found outside of Vim. Maybe in the settings of
your window manager, if you can get at them. Otherwise, if you still
have some not yet taken mappable key (maybe a non-ASCII key like the
³² and £µ keys present on my keyboard), try moving whatevr you have on
Alt-F10 to some such key.

Best regards,
Tony.

[cjsmall]

The window manager is possibly responsible for some of these

Alt assignments. In gvim. on my system, Alt-[FETSBWH] display

the File/Edit/Tools/Syntax/Buffers/Window/Help pull-down

menus.  Alt-F10 is the only function key of the twelve that is

being co-opted and duplicating the Alt-F function.  This is why

I thought that it might be specific to gvim and was hoping that

there was a way to control this externally without having to

recompile from scratch.

As for the build, 8,.1 is the current package in the Ubuntu

repository.  It is using GTK3 and was compiled a year ago

on 04-15-20.  It would be great if Sven or someone could goose

the maintainer to update the package.  I've tried!  :-(

[cjsmall]

Following up to my own post:

Tony was correct.  It turns out that I CAN map the Alt-F10 key after all

and it does do what I want withing gvim.  However, if that key combo

is not mapped, then the File pull-down menu gets displayed.  I was

confused because I have some mappings defined in .vimrc files

local to certain directories, but I have some master unmapping

definitions defined in my master (global) vimrc file.  I was working on

the master file first, adding gvim unmapping definitions in parallel

with my working unmapping definitions for standard terminal use.

In other words, I was adding gvim blocks using:

if has ('gui_running')

   <additions>

else

    <standard unmappings>

endif

None of the Alt-Fn keys were actually mapped at this point and

thus, Alt-F10 was always failing over to the File pull-down menu.

However, when I went to the directories where the mapping

definitions were actually defined, then whenever I edited a file

where Alt-F10 was actually mapped, it worked as desired!

Once I realized all this, I was able to deactivate Alt-F10 from

interacting with the File menu by making sure it was always

defined by adding the following to the master vimrc:

if has ('gui_running')

    "  Stop Alt-F10 from pulling down the File menu
    nnoremap  <M-F10> <nop>
    inoremap  <M-F10> <nop>
endif

I hope that explanation makes sense.  Sorry to bother everyone

with my confusion as to what was actually going on.  A big

thanks to Tony for his very detailed reply.

[Tony Mechelynck]

It does indeed make sense. Using <Nop> as the {rhs} of a mapping is
the canonical way to make sure that the corresponding {lhs} does
nothing. There are rare cases where certain keys cannot be used as the
{lhs} of a mapping but usually it works.

Best regards,
Tony.

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