Opening a context menu (with the Menu key)

Question

Is it by any chance possible to make the Menu key work as one would expect in Mathematica: opening a context menu?

The Menu key does nothing in version 7 or 8 on Windows.

Answer 1

This isn't a full answer, but maybe those with more knowledge can take it from here.

To capture key presses of a particular key, one can do the following:

k=0;
SetOptions[$FrontEndSession, 
 FrontEndEventActions -> {{"KeyDown", "q"} :> (++k), PassEventsDown -> True}
]

The previous example increments k each time the letter q is pressed. Note: the "PassEventsDown" is important. Without it, q won't ever actually show up in your notebook.

To do more fun things, you can try to call a front end element with the following:

FrontEndTokenExecute["CellContextDialog"]

This automatically launches the front end dialog that is mentioned. A full list of Front End Tokens is available here. Putting things together:

SetOptions[$FrontEndSession, 
 FrontEndEventActions -> {{"KeyDown", "q"} :> (++k; 
     FrontEndTokenExecute["CellContextDialog"]), 
   PassEventsDown -> True}
]

There are two problems here:

1. I don't know if there is a FrontEndToken corresponding to the "Right Click" / "Contxt" menu
2. I don't know if there is a name for the Menu Key
3. I have no idea what I'm doing with the SetOptions[$FrontEndSession]... I might have broken other things.

Maybe you can hack together something from this!

Answer 2

In the past I had some success interfacing Mathematica with Wiimotes using the programs PPJoy and GlovePIE. GlovePIE took care of the Wii stuff and PPJoy has hooks for it. PPJoy can be used to let Windows believe it's connected to a joystick. In that way even a keyboard can be turned into a joystick, with buttons and all.

The nice thing is, Mathematica has access to most game devices (including this virtual one) using the ControllerState function. So, if you get PPJoy to install it should be relatively easy to let a certain button activate something. We would still need to find a FrontEnd token for this specific event. A long list may be found here. I don't believe it's in there.

PPJoy worked flawless on my old win XP laptop I used when working with this setup, but on win7 there appears to be problems. A workaround can be found here or here.

Answer 3

I tried AutoHotKey with this code and it worked:

#IfWinActive, ahk_class NotebookFrame
AppsKey::Send {Click right}
#IfWinActive