Feature Description:

Right now, many decisions, in particular menu enablement, are based on the focused element. If we talk of "focused element", one needs to understand that "focus" always means "keyboard focus". This leads to problems like this one: #14002. Without going into detail: the problem there is that the menu bar accepts the focus (it needs, to, otherwise it would not be navigable by keyboard and therefore not accessible). This leads to the menu being rebuilt. We also have some workarounds in the code because Theia needs the focus on the "right" element to compute the enabled and visible elements. This code is brittle and prone to break when changing anything (like making dynamic menu contributions actually work).

I propose the we introduce the concept of "active element" per window and base action enablement upon this concept (i.e. the context keys get set when the active element changes). The Eclipse IDE has the similar concept of "WorkbenchPart", which can be either a view or an editor. In Theia, we'd have to analyze which elements constitute the parts, probably editors and view parts?

A workbench part generally becomes the active part through different routes:

1. An UI element inside the part accepts focus
2. The Window in which the part resides becomes the active window (for example because the use opens the window) and the part was the last or default active part for this window
3. The part is opened
4. The active part is changed through some keybinding or programmatic means (think "the debugger stopped on a breakpoint and now the debugger should become the active part")

When the keyboard focus moves out of the active part, the part remains the active part until another part becomes the active part. So things like the toolbar and menus can never be the active part and influcence action enablement.

Benefits

We could get rid of the hacks in our menus and streamline the action enablement code. I just spent two days analyzing an issue in our menu because we're overriding stuff from lumino/phosphor in complicate ways.