Re: Focusing a tree view

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 02:12, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> We allow focusing selectable GtkLabels by pressing Ctrl-Tab (or Ctrl-
> Shift-Tab when going backwards).  

Ideally not for much longer though, because apart from anything else, it
doesn't currently work on notebook pages, or in any other container that
uses Ctrl-Tab for its own ends :/

> I think the tree view would be better
> if tabbing into it gave the focus to the cursor row, and ctrl-tabbing
> into it gave the focus to the column headers.

I think that would be serious Ctrl-Tab overload, personally... using it
to focus labels is rather overstretching its definition as it is, and
I'd rather see focusable labels back in the regular tab chain (given
that there are so few of them anyway), and just fix the problems
elsewhere that caused us to revert the patch that originally did so.

Another idea that came up when we first discussed keynav for the
treeview was to only put the headers in the 'reverse' tab chain... i.e.
tabbing into a treeview (from either direction) would always focus the
first row, and pressing Shift-Tab at that point would step focus back to
the headers.  That gives a better match for task frequency v. number of
keystrokes required, but it just seems arbitrarily non-orthogonal.  Nor
is particularly discoverable (neither is Ctrl-Tab, which is another
reason I don't really like that idea), although I do actually find
myself trying it every now and again when focus has skipped the headers
in a table that I think ought to be sortable :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems