tabstop

Arguments: standard-object

Returns or sets with setf the value of the tabstop property of the argument. The value of this property can be true or nil. When a dialog is selected, pressing the TAB key can move focus from one control on the dialog to another. If the value of this property is true, pressing TAB will eventually move focus to this control. If the value is nil, this control will be skipped over by the TAB key. See tab-position which determines how many times TAB must be pressed after the dialog first appears before this control is reached (assuming tabstop is true).

multi-line-editable-text and tabstop

If a multi-line-editable-text control has the focus and the user presses the TAB key, then, if the component has the tabstop property turned on, the effect is to move the focus to the next component in the tab order. If tabstop is off (or if the component is just a text-edit-pane window rather than a multi-line-editable-text dialog-item), then a tab character is inserted into the text. In some earlier releases, you could enter a TAB character when the tabstop property is on by typing Shift-Tab. This is no longer true. A TAB cannot be conveniently entered when tabstop is on.

radio-buttons and tabstop

Windows only allows you to tab to a radio-button when it is on. The usual approach is to set the tab order of your dialog so that all of the radio-buttons that are in the same cluster will be adjacent in the tab order, and then make sure that the initial value of one of the radio-buttons in the cluster is non-nil. Then the user will be able to tab to the currently "on" radio-button in that cluster and then use the keyboard's arrow keys to move to the other radio-buttons in that cluster.

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This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.