Defining keyboard accelerators for actions
Keyboard accelerators are attributes defining the keyboard shortcuts for actions.
Keyboard accelerators can be defined at several levels (global action defaults, form file action defaults, dialog instructions).
ACTION DEFAULTS
section:ACTION DEFAULTS
ACTION print (TEXT="Print", ACCELERATOR=Control-P)
END
Up to four accelerator keys can be defined for the same action in action defaults. However, as a general pattern, define only one accelerator per action.
Do not use the same accelerator for different actions that are active in the same dialog context.
The runtime system sets default accelerators for predefined actions, when no accelerators are explicitly defined for the action. The default accelerator of predefined actions depends on the TUI/GUI user interface mode.
- In TUI mode, the
accept
action gets theEscape
key, that can be changed with theOPTIONS ACCEPT KEY
instruction. - In GUI mode, the
accept
action gets theReturn
andEnter
keys from FGLDIR/lib/default.4ad file. - In TUI mode, the
INPUT ARRAY
insert
/delete
predefined actions will respectively get the F1 and F2 accelerators. These can be changed withOPTIONS INSERT/DELETE KEY
instructions.INPUT ARRAY
andDISPLAY ARRAY
navigation (screen record page down / page up) is done with F3 / F4. These can be changed withOPTIONS NEXT/PREVIOUS KEY
instructions. - In GUI mode,
INPUT ARRAY
predefined actions andDISPLAY ARRAY
modification actions get the default accelerators from the FGLDIR/lib/default.4ad file:-
insert
accelerator is F3 -
append
accelerator is Control-F3 -
update
accelerator is F2 -
delete
accelerator is F4
-
When a user-defined action is configured with an accelerator that would normally be used for a
predefined action, the runtime system does not set that accelerator for the predefined action. For
example (in GUI mode), if you define an ON ACTION quit
with an action default using
the accelerator "Escape
", the "cancel" predefined action will not get the
"Escape
" default accelerator. In this case, user settings take precedence over
defaults.
Text edition and navigation keys such as [Home]
and [End]
are
usually local to the widget. Depending on the context, such common keys might be eaten by the
graphical widget and will not invoke the action configured with the corresponding accelerator. For
example, even if the "firstrow"
action defines the Home
accelerator, when using an INPUT ARRAY
, the [Home]
key will jump
to the beginning of the edit field, not the first row of the list.
When using the ON ACTION
clause in a dialog instruction, action accelerators are
used in both GUI and TUI mode. However, for backward compatibility, this is not done in TUI mode
when using the ON KEY
clause.
The traditional ON KEY
clause in a dialog like INPUT
implicitly
defines the acceleratorName
attribute for the action, and the corresponding action
default accelerator will be ignored. For example, when you define an ON KEY(F10)
block, the first accelerator will be "F10", even if an action default defines an accelerator "F5"
for the action "F10". However, you can set other accelerators with the
acceleratorName2
, acceleratorName3
and
acceleratorName4
attributes in action defaults.
In TUI mode, actions created with ON KEY
do not get
accelerators of action defaults; only actions defined with ON ACTION
will get
accelerators of action defaults.
In a MENU
dialog, the behavior is a bit different, see the COMMAND "option"
and COMMAND KEY(keyname)
clauses
of MENU
.
If you want to force an action to have no accelerator, you can use none
as the
accelerator name.