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I would like to be able to listen for all keyevents in an application (not just the control with focus) or register Actions with accelerators that do not require a menu presence.
So would I. It turns out that this is a very tricky thing to do portably and SWT does not have a good solution because there really is no good portable solution. One thing that will kind of work is to listen for all key and traversal events by hooking a key and traversal listener to every widget in the shell. If the shell has a menu, do not use MenuItem.setAccelerator(). The problem with this approach is that you'll get every key all right but so will the controls in the shell. So, if you look for 'A' in your key handler and focus is in a list widget, the 'A' will go to the list widget, causing it to scroll to an item that begins with the letter 'A' and your key handler will run. A further problem is that looking for 'Ctrl+<key>' in a key handler is danagerous on international platforms (on a German keyboard, a '@' is entered by holding down an special key that generates Ctrl+Alt so that an application that only tests the stateMask could do the wrong thing. So, there isn't a good solution to this problem. Fortunately, it's possible to build many applications that don't need this kind of fine grain control over key strokes. I'm linking your PR to the work that Eclipse is doing in this area so you'll be able to track what they are doing. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 5682 ***
Thanks for the info. I already tried the trick of adding a KeyListener to all controls, but this did not work for me in the case where I had push Buttons with mnemonics. If the button had a mnemonic of Alt-A it would activate and take the focus when Alt-A is pressed, all good. But then if the button has focus and 'A' is pressed the button activates again and I get no key event. Worse still if there are other buttons in the same Composite also with mnemonics they no longer require the Alt modifier either. I could see how this would be nice is most cases, but it is not something that works for my application.
