Re: Netbeans 6.1 focus-switch glitch
zerg wrote:
if you
push alt
push tab
release alt
release tab
Netbeans transfers focus to the menu bar on alt release, then Windows
switches task on tab release. (In the first case, Windows switches task
on tab release, and when alt release occurs Netbeans doesn't see it as
it no longer has keyboard focus at all.)
I can confirm that Thunderbird and other Windows apps don't focus the
menu bar if tab is pushed after alt is pushed and before alt is
released, only if alt is released without any tab push having occurred
since alt was last pushed down.
I, and probably many users, push alt, push tab, and then release both
nearly simultaneously, so about 50% of the time Netbeans editor panes
will lose input focus.
When I use the sequence "release ALT / release TAB" in any Windows window, the
effort to hold down the TAB key after releasing ALT will sometimes cause the
TAB key to repeat, issuing a series of TAB keycodes to the target window.
This is true across all Windows apps. Releasing the ALT key immediately
switches windows to the next window. Thereafter, holding the TAB key issues a
series of TAB keycodes to the new window.
When the target is NB in Windows, I get the behavior you describe.
The repeated TAB phenomenon also happens in Linux apps. In the case of NB on
Linux, the TAB-repeat series acts in whatever NB child pane the cursor had
been in to start with. This differs from the Windows behavior, where the TAB
acts in the menu pane. Since the Linux version of NB is the same bytecode as
the Windows version, I conclude that the difference is due to an interaction
between the JVMs and their host OSes.
I find it almost impossible to release the ALT key prior to the TAB key. It
is such an unnatural idiom. The usual idiom with ALT, like the other
shift-style keys SHIFT and CTRL, is to press and hold ALT, tap the other key
such as TAB, then release the ALT key.
Across both OSes, it seems like releasing the ALT prior to the TAB is a bad
idea and should be avoided no matter what apps one uses.
--
Lew