🚀 go-pugleaf

On 29 Jul 2004 06:37:11 -0700, Andrue Cope [TeamB] 
   <no.spam@spammy.com> wrote:

> Chris Croughton wrote:
> 
>> I don't want a dialog box, and I don't want anything to grab either
>> space or the cursor keys.  Think of a terminal emulator, for instance,
>> where the cursor keys need to send the appropriate codes to the other
>> end.
> 
> The important point is that only the component with the current focus
> gets sent the [space] keypress and only it gets a chance to respond to
> it.

Ah, I see.  So in this case it's the button which decides[1] that a
space will mean "click" and a tab means "go to the next button" or
whatever.  If the current focus is on an edit field, that interprets it.

[1] Simplification: it's actually the thing interpreting the component
and form data.

(Spot the person who doesn't normally program GUI at all <g>.  In fact I
normally regard a GUI or window manager only as a way to run 36 or more
xterms with the same physical screen, and occasionally copy and paste
between them...)

> When I wrote my editor (which was a couple of years ago now) I put a
> TEdit on the form and hid it under a panel. Its Visible property has to
> be True so that it can receive focus but you don't want the component
> visible to the user so cover it up :)

Presumably the TEdit was the same size as the panel?

> I don't know that a TEdit is the best component - I just picked that.
> Probably you just want whatever component consumes the least resources
> but has OnEnter/OnExit and possibly OnKeyPress/OnKeyDown events.

Right.

> I say possibly for the key events because all I have defined for the
> TEdit are OnEntry and OnExit which take care of drawing a focus
> rectangle around the edit window and setting a flag.

OK.

> My form responds to OnKeyPress and OnKeyDown on behalf of the editor
> and has Keypreview set to true. I'm not sure why I did this now but I
> do remember that it was a solution to something. TBH my knowledge of
> the VCL is based around "getting it working" rather than "coding it the
> right way" :)

The form responds to OnKeyPress?  How do you set it to do that?

Yup, "getting it working" is what I need.

> Whatever the merits of this strategy it is pretty simple and has worked
> for me for a couple of years now :)

The superstition paradigm: it worked when I did it that way once, so
I'll always do it that way <g>.  In a world which is too complex to
understand the details of everything, superstition is often the most
efficient way to do anything...

Thanks,

Chris C