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 :-)