Shortcuts in Swing? (question for pals from Apple)

[Mike Swingler]

On Nov 22, 2011, at 9:22 AM, Scott Kovatch wrote:

> On Nov 21, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Alexander Potochkin wrote:
> 
>> We have a code snippet which tests the various shortcuts in a simple Swing application,
>> Alt+A and Alt+B are among them.
>> 
>> It turned out that when the focus is inside a JTextArea,
>> Alt+A works as expected but Alt+B types a special symbol.
>> 
>> This behavior is different from what we have on Windows or Linux
>> and our testers consider it as a bug.
> 
> That test is making an invalid assumption that Alt is the shortcut accelerator on all platforms, and it isn't. In fact, I consider it a bug that Alt-A does not produce 'å' in that case.
> 
> On the Mac, Alt maps to the option key, which is what you use in combination with other keys to type many non-ASCII Roman symbols. The equivalent behavior of Alt on Windows or Linux is the Command key. This has always been the case on the Mac.
> 
> Somewhere in the Aqua L&F there is a mapping of key combinations to actions. It sounds like Alt+A may be mapped to 'select all'.
> 
>> Is there any workarounds to suppress typing on Alt+B?
>> (Alt+B + some other magic keys?)
> 
> You really don't want to change the behavior of Alt-B without a good reason, as users expect to see a character when you type Alt-B ('∫'). It's hard to answer this without seeing what the test is actually looking for. 
> 
>> By the way, how to move the focus out of a focused JTextArea on Mac?
>> On windows we use Ctrl+Tab, but it doesn't work on Mac.
> 
> It should be Shift+Tab. If it doesn't work that's a bug.

I wanted to circle back on this thread:

While "accelerators" are not a Mac OS X concept, we understand that some Java applications expect this functionality to be available (especially if they do not opt-into using the screen menu bar). Our best recommendation so far is to use Ctrl-Alt as the accelerator key mask, because it will not interfere with the Option-key extended character input method (and Ctrl is rarely used for direct command invocation on the Mac, in lieu of Command (a.k.a. Meta)).

Cheers,
Mike Swingler
Apple Inc.