How to add accelerator keys to menus?

[michael-hawker]

It'd be nice if the example showed how to do accelerator keys like Ctrl+N for the New menuitem in the example, or how to specify which letter in the Title becomes underlined for 'Alt' key usage for quick access to the menubar items when using keyboard navigation with alt.

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Document Details

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• ID: cd894ab6-9b28-956f-fd00-3d60de336045
• Version Independent ID: 5f80b19f-f8a7-4d66-bd46-2ba165f68c0f
• Content: Menus and context menus - Windows UWP applications
• Content Source: windows-apps-src/design/controls-and-patterns/menus.md
• Product: uwp
• GitHub Login: @jwmsft
• Microsoft Alias: jimwalk

[michael-hawker]

@stmoy are these supported scenarios like what we had in the toolkit? (Having alt accelerators for titles and keyboard shortcuts for specific commands?)

[stmoy]

This should be well supported using Keyboard Accelerators. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/input/keyboard-accelerators

[lukasf]

In the toolkit, it was possible to use a string like "^File" as string to get the "F" underlined in the menu and have it become hotkey automatically, like it was in WinForms or WPF menu.

Does the same functionality work in the MenuBar?

[michael-hawker]

@lukasf the toolkit ^ shortcut doesn't work, but you can set the AccessKey property to specify which key is used to access the menu with Alt.

        <winui:MenuBar>
            <winui:MenuBarItem Title="File" AccessKey="F">
                <MenuFlyoutItem Text="New" Icon="Add" AccessKey="N">
                    <MenuFlyoutItem.KeyboardAccelerators>
                        <KeyboardAccelerator Key="N" Modifiers="Control" />
                    </MenuFlyoutItem.KeyboardAccelerators>
                </MenuFlyoutItem>
            </winui:MenuBarItem>
        </winui:MenuBar>

@stmoy thanks for the link, it'd be good if we could add that to this article.

[lukasf]

@michael-hawker Thank you for the clarification.