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
.

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