god damn… I feel old now thanks to this post. This has been a thing since ever, even under MS Dos where TUI applications (like QBasic, Word, Turbo Pascal,…) had a menubar and you opened it with hitting Alt.

Also try: press Alt, then hit F (to unroll the File Menu) and then Q (to quit since the Q in Quit is underlined) to quit the window.

In many programs the alt key will access the toolbar, be it hidden or unhidden.
At least that seems to be the convention in Windows. I’m not sure what the convention would be on Linux.

It’s in a lot of program, not just ff. You can also see some letters are underlined in that menu, if you press that letter after alt, it would invoke that command or open that drop down without using the mouse. This is a convention at least from DOS, but I suspect it may be even older.

So actually alt doesn’t unhide the menu, it waits for a letter input to what command you want to start. It just happened that this old type of menu is hidden by default in a lot of programs and alt could be reused for this as well.

Are you…not familiar with standard program menu bars? Am I that old?

As a Millennial I make it permanently visible, because that’s how programs worked in my youth and that’s how I use it. I have to actually spend more mental energy using the “hamburger” menu instead of the top one because it’s unintuitive to me.

With the old style, things were always more or less grouped the same way. File IO operations in “file”, manipulation tools in “edit”, help topics in “help”, and so on. If you learned the basic layout, you could easily jump right in to most programs and use them immediately without having to learn a custom UI that is different with every application.

What year is it?

This is a meme, right?

Why is this so “downvoted” wtf

If you like that, try Alt+Spacebar

This gonna blow your socks right off.

It is standard Windows program behavior

That’d be a post for [email protected]