Re: GtkEntry behaviour on focus-in

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
>    I am just wondering if there is any reason to not have GtkEntry
> automatically select the contents of the Entry on Focus-In.  This is
> pretty useful in Windows, and is a bit annoying that all of our dialog
> boxes have this feature.

I wouldn't mind seeing "select current contents" as the default
behaviour either... only if you tabbed into the field using the
keyboard, though, not if you clicked in it with the mouse.  (But there
are certainly cases where it makes sense not to select the contents,
too, so it wouldn't be good to have it too hard-wired-- it ought to be
something the developer can choose.)

There's one slight problem with it, though-- if the field accepts tab
characters as input, then you could accidentally replace the entire
contents of the field with a tab character as you were tabbing through
the dialog.  (This problem isn't so bad the way it works now, because at
worst you would just insert an extra tab character in the entry field
that you could easily delete again).  This leads on to other debates,
some of which we've already had on the the GNOME Accessibility Project,
about whether it should be Tab, Ctrl+Tab or Shift+Tab that inserts a Tab
character into a text field  :o)

Also, if we did have the "select current contents" behaviour as default,
we'd need to be consistent about where to place the text cursor when you
tabbed into the field, too-- I don't think the current scheme (just
remembering where the cursor was last time) would make much sense if you
were selecting all the text as well.  Moving it to the end of the
selection might be a better idea.

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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