Guide on how to design an application to be fully keyboard driven as possible?

[vfclists]

Is there a guide on how to design a Lazarus GUI program to be keyboard driven as much as possible?

My main concern for now is how to handle the events depending on the active element, whether the widgets themselves handle the events or their parent widgets even the main form handle them.

[Thaddy]

The most used way, and in my opinion the best one is:
TActionlist -> TAction -> TAction.Shortcut'. TAction.OnExecute
But mind you, you should always check if a shortcut is not already taken by the OS and that can differ by OS or even terminal type (e.g. on Windows alt-tab, alt-F4 etc.)
You should also check if there are common standards for the type of application that you write and try to adhere to that.
That will make it easier for the end user, because it may be familiar. E.g. Lazarus mimics a great deal of the Delphi shortcuts.
You can easily check if you did not forget to implement a shortcut for a certain action.
The same action list can also be applied to menu's.

Some familiar sets of keyboard shortcuts are wordstar and msoffice:
http://cpmarchives.classiccmp.org/cpm/Software/Humongous/Editors/WordStar/Manuals/WordStar%20Command%20Reference.htm
and
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/keyboard-shortcuts-in-microsoft-365-e765366f-24fc-4054-870d-39b214f223fd


Note, if you use TActionlist it is always a good idea to write out all actions before you start programming them, so you know your logic beforehand.

[MarkMLl]

But mind you, you should always check if a shortcut is not already taken by the OS and that can differ by OS or even terminal type (e.g. on Windows alt-tab, alt-F4 etc.)

And that will vary by widget set, i.e. Qt will differ from GTK.

You should also check if there are common standards for the type of application that you write and try to adhere to that.
That will make it easier for the end user, because it may be familiar. E.g. Lazarus mimics a great deal of the Delphi shortcuts.

Although a friend working for Red Hat discovered that not one of his colleagues had heard of IBM's CUA guidelines on which much of the "UI as we understand it" is based.

MarkMLl

[Thaddy]

And many do not know or have read "About Face", by Alan Cooper et.al. which is still the definitive guide to user interface design.
(note to self: buy the 4th edition too, covers mobile etc)