Dropdown menu navigation by the keyboard After getting to the menu bar (which in OS/X is already a hassle) we can use the first letter to access the submenu - ‘w’ for ‘Window’ in the screenshot below:

Subsequently the ‘b’ was typed to access the ‘Background’ sub-submenu The question here is: how to expand it - without resorting to the arrow keys that are a big jump for the fingers and get them out of home row position?



What I tried: tab space enter. None of those work. Only right arrow: but once again that is inefficient - almost as costly as using the mouse.  Is there any way to do this quickly i.e. with hands remaining on or near home row?
Space or Enter both open a highlighted submenu where the current option does not have an action by itself. Right Arrow works when the current option does have an action, but you wish to open the submenu (I'm not aware of a single instance of such a case where it's not a bug).

This works regardless of whether you use ⌃F2 or clicking to open a menu. I am using macOS Sierra, but am not aware of this functionality missing from prior versions of macOS.

JetBrains apps such as PyCharm have an unfortunate bug where their submenus aren't just submenus since you can select the top level menu item too (try clicking on the highlighted item in your screenshot). Space prefers to select where possible, which won't expand the submenu. This is a specific bug with such apps.