Personally, I use tabs a lot, and am frustrated in the few places that I can't use it when writing text to (for instance) indent the first line of a paragraph. This would come into play with Pivot if TextArea were used (as an example) to compose an email message, to write comments in an online customer database, etc.
I have seen other apps that have a configurable setting that allows Ctrl-Tab (or equivalent) to either do the insert / tabstop operation and Tab move between fields or the reverse: to have Tab do the insert and Ctrl-Tab do the field move. I'm not sure how to do this kind of configuration thing with Pivot, other than to have a property or style specify it. Roger Whitcomb | Architect, Engineering | [email protected] | Ingres | 500 Arguello Street | Suite 200 | Redwood City | CA | 94063 | USA +1 650-587-5596 | fax: +1 650-587-5550 -----Original Message----- From: Greg Brown [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2010 1:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Displaying tabs in TextArea After thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if maybe the existing behavior might be preferable. In all other components, pressing Tab transfers focus to the next component. If we convert Tab key presses to spaces, we'll have to come up with some other way to transfer focus out of a TextArea. How important is Tab key support? I personally never use tabs myself unless I'm editing code, but TextArea isn't really designed for that purpose. What do others think? On Nov 8, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Jeremy Heiler wrote: > Thanks Greg. > > If you get around to it, could you send me the diff? I would really > like to see where the change was made. > > On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Greg Brown <[email protected]> wrote: >> Good question. TextArea doesn't currently support tab stops. It's kind of a pain and didn't seem worth the effort. >> >> However, as you noted, the Tab key is currently ignored, which may be confusing to users. It would be fairly easy to insert some number of spaces when the Tab key is pressed (I almost always configure my text editor to do this). I'll prototype it and see how it turns out. >> >> G >> >> On Nov 6, 2010, at 11:32 PM, Jeremy Heiler wrote: >> >>> Hi everyone, my name is Jeremy, and I am developing a text editor with >>> Pivot. I have set up a basic application that loads a file into a >>> TextArea, and so far working with Pivot has been very nice. >>> >>> My first question is, how can I display tabs in a TextArea? it seems >>> like they're either ignored or are simply not visual. I am also >>> looking how to insert tabs, but I assume that has to do with messing >>> with the listener for focusing. I haven't looked too much into that >>> yet, but any hints would be appreciated! >>> >>> Thanks, >>> //Jeremy >> >>
