Re: NSTextView unselects on tab clicks...
Re: NSTextView unselects on tab clicks...
- Subject: Re: NSTextView unselects on tab clicks...
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 18:06:55 -0400
on 6/28/01 4:06 PM, email@hidden at email@hidden wrote:
>
Its important that the user can
>
keep text selected while switching between different tabs, since those
>
tabs all modify the selected text, and its very annoying to have to keep
>
selecting the same text repeatedly.
I believe the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines folks think that switching tab
view items reflects the user's intent to commit the data in a pending text
field in the first tab. The guidelines clearly provide that clicking from
one text field to another in the same window commits any pending data
entered in the first text field, just as does hitting Enter, Return or Tab.
The theory for putting a tab view item switch in the same category would be
that the destination tab view item may contain text fields, and the user is
likely to click in one; since the user can no longer see the first text
field, he might forget that a pending, but perhaps not fully considered,
entry is still sitting there.
In any event, as you have discovered, this is how Cocoa behaves by default.
It seems right to me, because a user interface that allows switching back
and forth among different tab view items while editing a text field in one
of them is bound to get confusing. You are allowed to keep multiple text
fields pending in multiple windows, of course, but that is a different
situation: you can line them up side by side to see what you're doing.
So I think you should reconsider your interface. Perhaps your editing
controls could be placed in a drawer or a floating palette/utility window,
or left entirely to the menu bar.
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
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