Bugzilla – Full Text Bug Listing
| Summary: | Ctrl-Tab does not cycle through the opened documents | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Eclipse Project] Platform | Reporter: | Duong Nguyen <duongn> |
| Component: | UI | Assignee: | Tod Creasey <Tod_Creasey> |
| Status: | CLOSED FIXED | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | normal | ||
| Priority: | P2 | CC: | andy, bugs2112 |
| Version: | 1.0 | Keywords: | accessibility |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | PC | ||
| OS: | Windows 2000 | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
|
Description
Duong Nguyen
Control Tab is used to "go up"a level. In any view where the tab is processed (an editor or the console view for instance) using Control Tab allows you get the same behaviour as tabbing in a view that does not use the tab. For instance in the TasksView hitting tab moves you through the view tool bar, the main tool bar and some of the entries in those bars. In a text editor tab is used by the editor so Ctrl tab gives the same behaviour as Tab in the TasksView. I had a look on Word and Control Tab does nothing different than tab - which applications were you comparing it to? MSWord is probably a bad example since you can't open multiple documents in the same window. I've verified the Ctrl-Tab behaviour in Excel and Front Page. I should rephrase the original request. For accessiblity purpose, I would like a control key sequence that will switch between the opened editor windows. I don't necessarily want Ctrl-Tab to change its current behaviour (cycling between views). The same problem occurs when I want to tab between tabbed views. In the Java perspective, I can't switch between the Packages and Hierarchy view without using a mouse. May be there is a control key sequence already but I haven't figured it out yet. If you tab to the tab of any multipage window you can cycle through them using the left and right arrow keys - a mouse is not required. In Eclipse 2.0, you're now able to cycle through multipage views using the arrows which wasn't available in 1.0. Great! You still haven't resolved the original problem which was there's no way to cycle between open editors. I tried using the arrow keys but they are "eaten" by the text widget therefore I can't cycle between the editor's tabs. I would like to re-open this bug. Please see previous comment. You can do this by Control tabbing to the tab of your current editor and use the arrow keys there. However no - you cannot cycle through the editors currently. I will leave this open to investigate. Ctrl-F6 allows editor selection now Marking closed The problem is surely that Eclipse is breaking a standard platform convention. How does the current situation resolve this? Shouldn't the default configuration strive to maintain any key-bindings that are universally used by native apps where possible? There is a difference between a platform binding (such as Alt Esc to cycle through windows) and a popular set of conventions. In many applications they have only the tool bar and tabs so they have less to cycle through than us. We need a way to get out of the context you are in and Ctrl-Tab is an available key bindimg. Which apps are you referring to? As far as I can recall every single windows app with multiple document windows responds to CTRL+TAB. Firefox, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Visual Studio. I'm struggling to think of one that doesn't. I think Adobe Illustrator was odd in this regard but I don't have it installed to check. Every other app I can think of does. (note that Word has changed it's behaviour and opens seperate instances of the app itself so you would switch between Word documents with Alt+Tab. The key conceptual difference is whether the app using a Multiple Document Interface i.e. a parent frame and child windows. Eclipse does. An early version of Eclipse had this but it quickly disappeared and has been an annoyance to me ever since. It is an established Windows application convention (as others have pointed out) that control-tab should cycle through open documents. I hope this is added back in soon (or at least give us the option to map it ourselves in the preferences). (In reply to comment #12) > An early version of Eclipse had this but it quickly disappeared and has been an > annoyance to me ever since. It is an established Windows application > convention (as others have pointed out) that control-tab should cycle through > open documents. I hope this is added back in soon (or at least give us the > option to map it ourselves in the preferences). > This appears to already be the case -- the default mapping is Ctrl+F6, but it's easy (as any key mapping!) to change that to what it "should" be: Window > Preferences... > General > Keys > Command|Category > Window > Command|Name > Next Editor > Key Sequence|Name > Ctrl+Tab > Add > OK. This loads a pop-up of the open windows, which allows you to quickly scroll through to get to the desired editor/tab -- you can also simply tap Ctrl-Tab then release the keys to change directly to the next tab, though it's a wee bit slow (because the tab list has to pop up, then decide you're not using it). You can also map Ctrl+Shift+Tab to Window > Previous Editor; again, it does the popup, but also works as a single keystroke with that slight delay. And of course, there may be a way to turn off that popup or alter the delay to 1ms. Thanks to Mark Mandel via the CFEclipse mailing list for this tip! This maybe should be a separate bug, but does anyone else find the next-editor, previous editor only works sometimes? Is there some subtlety that I'm missing here or is it just buggy? I can't quite work out in what situations it fails to respond. It's something to do with focus. And my god does the keyboard short-cut editor screen need a bit of usability loving... |