Hi Micha,

> Right, but from time to time the UI pop up again and that worries.

It should never pop up if you are only typing...

If it pops up randomly when you are only typing instead of on a click, then that would be a bug. Are there some steps that you can show me that reproduces that problem?

The only time that it is supposed to pop up is if you clicked on a control with the mouse.


I should be able to add in an option in moi.ini to turn them off, but in general if you want to type in values rather than use the mouse, then like Tony mentions just start typing or push Tab and it will not pop up.

As a bonus you will even have saved an extra action since you won't need to click with the mouse at all then.

- Michael

The problem is the popup after mouseclick. I click on a field and want to start to write the number, I must close the num pad field per mouse. But I have an other idea, no option is needed. Why not let the user ignore the num pad UI? Click - write - TAB ... after the TAB the num pad could be automatic closed. We could call it a bug, that the TAB dosn't work, if the num pad is open. If it is manual closed, than the TAB works like expected, could be nice to get it during the open num pad too.

Hi Micha,

> We could call it a bug, that the TAB dosn't work, if the num pad is open.

Nope, that's what is called a "feature request", not a bug.... ;)


If I remember right, the reason I didn't attempt that originally was that the numpad covers up that next control that you would tab to, so that seemed to possibly be a little bit odd.

But I think it would make sense to do that - I'll take a look, it is probably not difficult to make it work like that.

- Michael

>> We could call it a bug, that the TAB dosn't work, if the num pad is open.

>Nope, that's what is called a "feature request", not a bug.... ;)

:)

Thanks

On the subject Michael, just wondering why you haven't got the number pad for the object size ?

-

Hi jonah & Micha - I've made some updates to this area for the next v2 beta.

There will be a new setting in moi.ini that you can change to turn off those flyout panels so that they do not show up when you click on an input field. That will be in the [UI] section:

[UI]
DisableNumericInputFlyout=n

In the next beta release, switching that to =y will stop them from showing.


Also I've made the Tab key work when a flyout is open, it will close the flyout, commit any values you have entered, and move focus to the next field, in inline edit mode (meaning without the flyout activated).


- Michael

Hi Tony,

> Is it possible to have the field that has the initial focus have highlighted text?

Actually, it should actually be behaving like that already - for example if you have the mesh dialog open and you hit Tab to move focus into the first field, it will highlight all the text.

Otherwise, if you type numerals directly it is slightly different - focus does not actually move into that individual control until after you have typed the first number. That's the "auto-focus" mechanism kicking in, which will set focus for you automatically if it sees you have typed a number and there is an available input field to put it into.

- Michael

Hi Danny,

> On the subject Michael, just wondering why you haven't got
> the number pad for the object size ?

It felt slightly odd since the number pad was kind of hanging off of that smaller sized menu quite a ways, and it seemed that this area would probably be one where someone might want to type in a bunch of numbers to control things more often.

So I decided to make that one a sort of more "type-in" kind of an area only.

There are also some other differences in those controls as well, their number of decimal places has been boosted to show more digits than the default display, and they have some special values available to them in expressions, like "r" for radius, etc...

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>> Actually, it should actually be behaving like that already - for example if you have the mesh dialog open and you hit Tab to move focus into the first field, it will highlight all the text.

I knew this one.

>>Otherwise, if you type numerals directly it is slightly different - focus does not actually move into that individual control until after you have typed the
>> first number. That's the "auto-focus" mechanism kicking in, which will set focus for you automatically if it sees you have typed a number and there is
>>an available input field to put it into.

This was the one I was after. If the blue highlight was there it would be obvious that you can type and it will appear in that box. This would follow the standard windows convention, fields highlighted with blue background will receive the text input. With no highlight most users will click in the field to make sure it has the focus as this is required in most other apps. Of course then the num pad pops up and you've lost the TAB function.

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

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

Hi Tony, also:

> Of course then the num pad pops up and you've lost the TAB function.

The losing TAB issue is fixed up for the next beta release. In the next release if you have clicked on a control so that the num pad is open, it will now work to use TAB to move focus to the next control.

- Michael

>> The losing TAB issue is fixed up for the next beta release.

Cool, thanks Michael. I tend to use both methods depending on what I am doing and how much my RSI is bothering me on the day :-)