Ctrl+Tab does not move focus through tabs in dialog boxes

[nick rundy]

When interacting with a dialog box in Ubuntu, pressing Ctrl+Tab should advance the focus to the next tab in the tab-list of the dialog box.

For example, "System Settings > Appearance" shows two tabs:
1. LOOK
2. BEHAVIOR

pressing Ctrl+Tab should move the focus between these two tabs. Yet this keyboard shortcut is not working in 12.04 LTS.

Looking at System Settings, Ctrl+Tab is not working in any of the following dialog boxes:
--Appearance
--Language Support
--Keyboard
--Sound
--Privacy
--Time & Date
--Universal Access

[nick rundy (nrundy)]

This really should be marked at a higher importance than "Wishlist." Especially for an LTS. This is a standard keyboard shortcut that is in use across OSes that greatly facilitates accessibility to OS settings.

The Dash is even supposed to use it for its equivalent of tabs: lenses

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[nick rundy (nrundy)]

Filed upstream bug with GNOME: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=671273

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

To be fair, I don't believe Ctrl+Tab is a standard GNOME shortcut to switch between tabs.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I'm going to close this bug since as the GNOME developers indicated on the attached bug, there are two ways to use the keyboard to navigate between tabs in GNOME:

1. Press the tab key until the focus is on the tabs, then press left or right.
2. Use Ctrl+Page Up or Ctrl+Page Down.

[nick rundy (nrundy)]

Part of the problem is that Windows users don't know about Ctrl+Page Up. Windows only uses Ctrl+Tab. And since everything else in the windows world also does (eg., Firefox, Chrome, Opera, all Windows programs, etc), users never learn that Ctrl+Page Up exists. I just saw a bug report somewhere else for a Linux application where the user was requesting a Ctrl+Tab shortcut and the developer told them about Ctrl+Page Up and the user had no idea this shortcut existed because he was a Windows veteran and thought Ctrl+Tab was the universal shortcut for moving between tabs.

A big impetus for this bug report is the fact that with Precise Ubuntu has essentially incorporated almost all the Windows keyboard-shortcuts into Ubuntu. Since every other shortcut is going to be virtually identical to Windows, people will assume Ctrl+Tab will move them between tabs. And when it doesn't they will assume no shortcut exists to do this (they will not consider that another keyboard shortcut exists to do the same thing).

Food for thought.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Ok, Nick, I'll reopen this as a GTK wishlist bug. You should probably change the upstream bug to be against GTK also, as this should be fixed for every app, not just for gnome-control-center.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue is that ctrl-tab is already used for focus cycling (especially to get out of widgets using tab like text entries), see bug #388508 or http://<email address hidden>/msg02070.html or https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87764

[nick rundy (nrundy)]

@Jeremy Bicha

I'm just trying to bring this to you guys' attention. Whatever you guys think is best, I'll support. I just wanted to present this viewpoint so that it was at least represented. Windows often does not have the best way of doing things and so shouldn't always be copied. But Precise is bringing in so many other Windows shortcuts, I thought Ctrl+Tab should be pointed out.