It's worth me quickly interjecting here to say that a button being
default does not automatically imply that the button has the focus by
default. Therefore, this suggestion is another behavioral change that
needs to be carefully understood.
-- Jonathan
On 8/06/16 10:04 AM, Tomas Mikula wrote:
What about forgetting the whole notion of a "default button" and the
only effect of setting the default property to true being that the
button will start as focused?
So I add a question:
3) Would anyone miss the "default button"?
Tomas
On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 5:47 PM, Jonathan Giles
<jonathan.gi...@oracle.com <mailto:jonathan.gi...@oracle.com>> 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
