What does & in the translated strings do?

Software
1

In several of the translated strings in the user interface, there is a & character (single) in front of one of the letters. It can be in the beginning of a word or in the middle of a word.
One example can be seen here:

I have tried to look at some of the wxWidgets documentation to see what it does, but it seems I don’t have enough background information to find out or look in the right place…

Could someone give me a quick explanation of the significance of the & in the UI strings?

Thanks in advance.

2

They are accelerator key markings. The key in front of the & can be used as a hotkey to select that menu entry when the menu is open.

https://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/localization-guide/en/latest/guide/translation/accelerators.html

3

I suspected as much; thanks for the confirmation.
The accelerator keys are shown when the “Alt” key is held down, at least in fedora Linux 37 / KDE.

Does wxWidgets do anything about this at all, or does it just pass down the string to the window manager, which then handles the underlining of the accelerator keys when Alt is pressed, and the recognition of which accelerator key has been pressed?
Or in other words, what happens where in the code, in general terms…?
Somewhere the choice resulting of the use of an accelerator key must come back into wxWidgets and the KiCad code.

4

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