Hi Tony,

> It was just a thought to make this a little more obvious.
> Looks like it doesn't work that way though.

The main problem with that, is that it would then look as if the full regular focus was on that control when it wasn't (when instead it was just a candidate for having auto-focus applied to it).

When the focus is on a control, then every single keystroke will go to that control, overriding any shortcuts that may be assigned to those same keys.

For example the arrow keys can normally be assigned to be used as a shortcut key. But when a numeric field has focus, they move the caret inside the field instead of triggering the shortcut.

Similarly other keys like "A", etc... will get typed into a numeric field when it has focus instead of executing any shortcut that may be assigned to A - this is necessary to be able to support expressions that may call math functions like acos, sin, tan, etc..


So in order to allow for shortcuts to work like that (and to support single key activation rather than only things like Ctrl+Key), only numbers will get automatically funneled into a numeric edit field with the auto-focus mechanism, not all keystrokes.

If the highlight was on all the time just when the fields first appeared before it actually had the focus, it would probably make people think that all their keystrokes would go there when they actually don't.

- Michael