Syllable

aritc02 · Joined: 28 Feb 2008 Posts: 214

I have been doing some work on the prefs dialogs and one of the things I have been doing is straightening up the tab order for the controls and the dropdownmenu control is really bugging me on this. Once the dropdownmenu has the focus, pressing the tab key tabs between the dropdownmenu's edit box and the dropdownmenu's button and not to the next control on the dialog as set in code. Can anyone else produce this or is my system caught in an old Twilight Zone episode? This seems to be consistent.

Adam

Vanders · The Knights of Syllable Joined: 14 Sep 2007 Posts: 830

Any Control that uses Tab for it's own functions will do this. A multi-line TextView with is another culprit. For TextView it's probably correct, for DropDownMenu and any other Control which does this, it probably isn't and should be fixed. Tab is a pretty poor interface to elements in a list, in any case.

Morph · Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 8:40 am Post subject:

IIRC Haiku/BeOS has an override key Shift+Tab which always means 'move focus to the next element', even in things like TextViews which might otherwise absorb the keypress. If you press tab in a normal view it will cycle the focus only if it doesn't get absorbed by the view for some other purpose. But Shift+Tab always gets captured earlier up the chain and handled specially, and never gets passed to any views.
(Something similar may or may not be suitable for us, just mentioning it Smile

)

Kaj · Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 8:46 am Post subject:

Sounds good.

Vanders · The Knights of Syllable Joined: 14 Sep 2007 Posts: 830

Shift + Tab sounds good to me as a general solution, although I'd also like to change the use of Tab in DropDownMenu anyway.

aritc02 · Joined: 28 Feb 2008 Posts: 214

Yes, I see what you mean. I had forgotten about the tab behaviour in the text view control. I think Shift + Tab is a good suggestion too.

Adam

Morph · Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 4:33 pm Post subject:

I looked at the Haiku code, and it seems I was wrong... they reserve Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab for navigation between controls. These events never get sent to views. Unmodified Tab does get sent to views and is not used for navigation in Haiku.

Morph · Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 5:35 pm Post subject:

I've made some fixes and changes to keyboard navigation, particularly for compound views like Spinner and DropdownMenu that contain other views. Try them out in the next dev build and see if you can see any improvements (or regressions!). There will still be some apps where keyboard navigation doesn't work though as each app currently has to specifically support it.