I just discovered that many Gnome dialog boxes do have keyboard shortcuts to reach controls or tabs with Alt+letter — only they are not displayed. The shortcuts do appear in the form of an underlined letter when I hold Alt down.
How can I make the shortcut letter always underlined, so that the shortcuts are discoverable? Same question for menu items, by the way.
What I see normally:
What I see with Alt held down, and I want to see all the time:
I found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10103922/gnome-3-always-show-altx-keyboard-shortcuts, which suggests adding gtk-auto-mnemonic = 0 to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 for Gnome 2 and dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/automatic-mnemonics false for Gnome 3. Neither seems to have any effect in my session though.
In Ubuntu 12.04, in my sessionafter setting automatic-mnemonics to false, shortcut letters still don't appear unless I hold Alt down (I tried in pavucontrol, evince and gnome-control-center). I start my session from Lightdm and I am not running a Gnome session. My window manager is Sawfish. I do have a D-Bus daemon, and other dconf settings take effect immediately (e.g. /org/gnome/desktop/background/draw-background). If I start another session with startx on the same machine, the change of automatic-mnemonics is not reflected. However, if I run a default (Unity or Gnome) session in a different account, automatic-mnemonics takes effect immediately.
The
dconfmethod works for me on 12.04. What you may try:Are you modifying the
dconfentry for the same user as with you launch the applications. (e.g. don't usesudo) Thedconfsettings are per-user.Is your
~/.config/dconf/userfile writeable by your user?Maybe that file is corrupted. Try making a backup of the
~/.config/dconf/userfile, and then remove it. Logout, login and then try again the dconf settings with the newly generated file.