Skip to content

DevFaqLogicalKeybindings

Antonio Vieiro edited this page Jan 25, 2018 · 1 revision

DevFaqLogicalKeybindings

Why should I use D- for Ctrl and O- for Alt - I thought C stood for Ctrl and A stood for alt?

(Wondering what this is about? See the general FAQ item on keybindings).

There should be no Alt-bound keyboard shortcuts on Macintosh, ever - it is used on international keyboards as the compose key (for a long time, we didn’t know it, but Norwegian and French users could not type } or { in NetBeans - kind of limits the usefuless of a Java IDE).

All standard shortcuts should be bound with wildcard keys - e.g., in the layer, not AS-P for Alt-Shift-P, but OS-P, which will map to Alt-Shift-P on PC and Ctrl-Shift-P on mac. For Ctrl/Command, in the layer put DS-P instead of CS-P to bind conditionally to ctrl on PC and command on mac.

All Alt-bound keybindings in the IDE are specified with O so that they are rebound to Ctrl on mac, because they will interfere with typing in a lot of locales (the real way to think about it is "the mac does not have an Alt key" - it does but it is a composition key - you can’t use it).

Any alt-bound keybinding on mac is a bug. If you use the logical syntax for keybindings, your app will always work intuitively on any platform.

Note that the mapping handling does skip key combinations that simply can’t work on Mac - for example, Command-H and Command-Q are always consumed by the OS, so D-H and D-Q map to Ctrl-H and Ctrl-Q, respectively, everywhere.

Apache Migration Information

The content in this page was kindly donated by Oracle Corp. to the Apache Software Foundation.

This page was exported from http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqLogicalKeybindings , that was last modified by NetBeans user Tboudreau on 2010-02-24T21:17:52Z.

NOTE: This document was automatically converted to the AsciiDoc format on 2018-01-26, and needs to be reviewed.

Clone this wiki locally