Hi all,
Thanks for all your feedback. I think we have mostly coalesced around
doing the right thing per platform. I have therefore gone ahead and
posted a webrev for review as part of the following Jira issue:
Jira: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8139509
Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jgiles/8139509/
In choosing this Jira issue to be the flag bearer for this particular
issue, I also closed other related issues as duplicate of this issue. I
may have missed some, but it was my intent to fold all discussion
related to the ENTER key behavior with buttons on various platforms into
this one issue. If you have any feedback on this patch or the direction
it takes, please follow-up in the jira issue above.
The other element that was raised as part of the discussion was that on
Windows the visual representation of the default button is only visible
when another button doesn't have the focus. This is because button focus
takes precedence over the default button. Because this is a visual
change (and the current code relates to the behavioral change), I
decided in this instance to create another Jira issue to track this:
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8159121
Thanks,
-- Jonathan
On 8/06/16 9:47 AM, Jonathan Giles wrote:
Hi all,
One thing I've been looking into recently is the issue of what the
Enter key should do when it is pushed with regards to buttons in a UI
where one of those buttons is a 'default' button. There are number of
Jira issues on this topic, and I wanted to poll the community to
understand its opinions.
The current situation is that the Enter key does not fire the focused
Button. The Enter key is reserved for firing the 'default' Button in
the UI (i.e. if someone has created a Button instance with the default
property set to true). A default button is rendered slightly
differently (in Modena it is blue for example). To fire the focused
Button, the user must press the Space key.
Tom Schindl filed a bug (JDK-8139510) that is a good example of the
'problem' this creates. In the bug report, a dialog is shown to the
user. In the dialog is an OK button and a Cancel button. The OK button
has been made the 'default' button. Regardless of which button has
focus, the Enter key always fires the OK button. The only way to fire
the Cancel button is via the Space key. This can be very confusing for
users who have tabbed specifically to the 'Cancel' button and then
pressed the Enter key, only to find they unwittingly fired the 'OK'
action.
To me this has always been a little counter-intuitive, because of my
heritage as a long-time Windows user. I believe Linux is much the same
as Windows. For others who grew up on Mac, I'm less sure on what
people expect (but it seems to be that the Enter key fires the default
button, not the focused button, i.e. JavaFX current behavior matches
what is expected on OS X).
What I'm proposing we do is to change the behavior as follows:
1) On OS X we do not change behavior at all - we keep the current
'Enter means default' and 'Space means focus' semantics.
2) On non-OS X platforms, we change the behavior so that Enter (and
Space) will fire the _focused_ key, if one is focused. If no Button is
focused (e.g. focus is in a TextField, etc), then Enter will work as
it currently does and fire the default button, if one is specified. In
short, default buttons will still be rendered blue to hint to the user
that they are the default button, but they will be less prevalently
fired by Enter key presses - only when they also have focus.
The two questions that I have are:
1) Will this confuse users when there is a behavior change (and
presumably, this change will be made in JDK 9 and not backported to
JDK 8). If it will confuse users, is it still the right thing to do?
2) Do we want to have different behaviors for OS X and non-OS X? I'm a
newly inducted member into the cult of Mac, and I don't yet have all
my bearings sorted out, so I don't have a strong opinion here.
Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated.
-- Jonathan
