Main Menu items hints does not show on Windows 7 64 bit

[alauraitis]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to ask about using Hint property on MainMenu items in Lazarus. Found a couple of forum posts but without an answer.  I'm building an application with a menu (no popop menu just main menu) and want to show hints for different menu items. However the hints does not show neither on design time nor at run time. I've changed the property ShowHint to true in the parent control (Form1) and hints does not show also. What is the problem here?

Another question is about using "&" symbol in menuitems caption. I've read the the "&" symbol should put an underline to a character in order to access tje menuitem quicker. At design time this behaviour is correct however at runtime the underline character goes away? Any suggestions here?

P.S. Earlier i've used Delphi and Hints did show there when ShowHint property was set to true on Form1.

Best regards and waiting for replies

[JuhaManninen]

I think you found a bug which is not reported yet.
At least Linux+GTK2 has the same problem.

Please report.

Juha

[Blaazen]

Another question is about using "&" symbol in menuitems caption. I've read the the "&" symbol should put an underline to a character in order to access tje menuitem quicker. At design time this behaviour is correct however at runtime the underline character goes away? Any suggestions here?

Aren't accelerated characters hidden on some Windows themes? What happens when you press Alt? Or those characters visible in other applications?
IIRC this was discussed here on forum (I am not Windows user ATM).

[Bart]

I wanted to ask about using Hint property on MainMenu items in Lazarus. Found a couple of forum posts but without an answer.  I'm building an application with a menu (no popop menu just main menu) and want to show hints for different menu items. However the hints does not show neither on design time nor at run time. I've changed the property ShowHint to true in the parent control (Form1) and hints does not show also. What is the problem here?

I recently had the smae problem and even thought about reporting it as a bug, but then I found out that my Delphi (3.0) also did not show hints on TMenuItems.

Bart

[JuhaManninen]

Aren't accelerated characters hidden on some Windows themes? What happens when you press Alt? Or those characters visible in other applications?
IIRC this was discussed here on forum (I am not Windows user ATM).

Yes, the accelerator works with GTK2. Only the missing hint seems to be a common (LCL-) problem.

Juha

[alauraitis]

Hello,
Thanks for some replies. Ok, so it seems to be a problem with displaying hints for menu items. I'll try to report it as a bug. And accelerator does not seem to work in Windows 7 as well. (the underline shows in design time but not in run time and doint tricks with Alt key does not help)

[alauraitis]

Also, i've noticed that hints do show properly on the form (when mouse cursor is on the form, but on menu items it does not work).

[alauraitis]

I've found an article how to show menuitem hints. It is here: http://delphi.about.com/od/vclusing/a/menuitemhints.htm   However this article is for Delphi applications. I've tried to port it to Lazarus, but without luck. First i've used the conversion utility (failed) and after that I created a new Lazarus app and tried to put the code here. However i get an error  that Lazarus can't recognize AppEvnts unit.  Delphi has this TApplicationEvents component in Additional Palette and Lazarus does not. So is there a way to walk this around? I've tried to put a TApplicationProperties component but i still get errors:

unit1.pas(46,50) Error: Identifier not found "TWMMenuSelect"
unit1.pas(46,74) Error: Identifier not found "WM_MENUSELECT"
unit1.pas(46,74) Error: Illegal expression after message directive

Anybody has suggestions?

[JuhaManninen]

Anybody has suggestions?

See my note on your issue report:
  http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=21407

Juha

[IPguy]

I just ran into this issue (and saw the bug report).
What confused my users is that they were seeing hints as they traversed the menu structure, but it turned out that they were seeing the hints from the objects under the menu items.

I wonder - to reduce the confusion - might it be possible to turn off the hints on the underlying window when the menu is active?  Does not appear possible as the menu only has an "OnChange" event and not an "OnEnter" or similar event.

[Bart]

What confused my users is that they were seeing hints as they traversed the menu structure, but it turned out that they were seeing the hints from the objects under the menu items.

What do you mean by that: "from the objects under the menu items".

Can you attach a sample programtodemonstrate the problem?

Bart

[IPguy]

See attached source code.
This was created using 0.9.31-35589-2.6.1, win32-Vista.

If you look at the menu items in the OI, each of them have a hint.
None of the hints display in the status bar.
When I have the menu open and the menu under my cursor is over one of the buttons, the hint from the button is displayed in the status bar.

[goldenfox]

Same problem here.

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate
Lazarus Daily snapshot v0.9.31 rev 36173 win32

[IPguy]

I would be comfortable if there was a way to disable the form hints while the menus were active.  At least that way there would be no confusion.

However, the menu's do not have any sort of onEnter/onExit events, so I am not able to do an explicit statusbar1.AutoHint = True / false (or similar)

[goldenfox]

I've searched through bugtracker and it seemed like it's already there since 2011

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=20101