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It is common practice to bind the Edit->Delete action of any application to the 'Delete' key (DEL). Eclipse is missing this binding. As a work around, it would have been nice for an end-user to have the option of going into the Preferences->Workbench->Keys page to set the accelerator. However, the Delete/Del option is also missing there, under the key sequence combo box. Having taken a quick glance at the Eclipse source code, it appears that all views & editors are hard coded to listen to the handleKeyPressed event, for SWT.DEL
This has been partly fixed in 3.0. "org.eclipse.ui.edit.delete" is bound to "DEL", and new implementors are being encourage to use this command. There is still a lot of legacy code that is using "DEL" directly, and this probably won't change in the 3.0 timeline (there is simply not enough time left). To make this as seamless as possible, the key binding system allows delete to be proposed by the focus control before attempting to apply the key binding. This allows native widget behaviour to take precedence, as well as legacy delete key listeners. This solution is not perfect, but for most users should be transparent. It's only if you actually bind delete to something other than "DEL" that you might see inconsistent behaviour. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 44354 ***
