Description Carolyn MacLeod 2011-10-19 16:01:17 EDT

This discussion was split off from bug 317465 comment 7.
We need to let keyboard users to move parts around, and change their size.

In 3.x, the Move and Size items in the part's context menu allowed the user to do a kind of fake drag and drop using the keyboard. Also, the New Editor menu item in an Editor Stack let the user do the equivalent of a ctrl+drag and drop, and the Fast View and Detached menu items in a View Stack let the user do the equivalent of dropping a View onto the fast view area or out of the window.

For eclipse 4.x, we should move these accessibility items back into the context menus where appropriate. However, we should first see what other applications are doing in each area. For example, Firefox allows the use of ctrl+arrows to move a focused tab item around within a browser (aka within a part stack). We could maybe do something similar.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard%20shortcuts#w_windows-tabs

As for moving to another part stack... instead of drawing a box and allowing arrow keys to move the part pixel by pixel, perhaps better to provide a submenu of places where the part could go. (This could even include Fast View and Detached, if 4.x still has those concepts).

Not sure whether we can do something similar for Size. The standard way to Size a window using the keyboard (i.e. on Windows, press alt+space to get the system menu, select Size, then use arrow keys or ctrl+arrows to adjust, and Enter to keep or Esc to cancel) should be followed as much as possible, however in this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms971323.aspx#atg_keyboardshortcuts_interacting_with_ui_elements
they say "The Size command can be more powerful if done either logically or numerically" and they give an example in MS Excel.

The "New Editor" menu item should probably just go back into the tab item's context menu. It might be more consistent to call this "Duplicate Editor" (IE has a similar concept using the word Duplicate).