PowerAda Keyboard Accelerators
The main interface for development in PowerAda is Motif. Motif has a number of standard window types, or widgets, which come with standard mouse and key sequences that will apply regardless of the application or the content of the window. Below are some that some that should work in PowerAda and other Motif applications as well.
In this description, MB1, MB2, and MB3 refer to the left, middle, and right mouse buttons, respectively (sometimes MB1, MB3 are reversed for left-handed mouse). The keyboard is a standard IBM keyboard, where there is a keypad containing keys Insert, Delete, Home, End, PageUp, PageDown to the upper-right of the main keyboard, and LeftArrow, UpArrow, DownArrow, and RightArrow to the lower-right.
Note that some of the mouse-related operations may not work very smoothly if you have a slow X connection, or your X server machine is overloaded. You can possibly remedy this by increasing the number associated with the *.multiClickTime resource. The default value for this and other user-configurable powerada resources may be found in the files $POWERADA/tools/lib/app-defaults/Powerada and Adbg.
Quickly pushing and releasing MB3 will bring up a popup menu in the main window of powerada and adbg, and leave it up. You can drag the mouse to the item you want in the menu, and click it again to activate it. If the item you want is a cascaded menu, a quick click on that item will open the next menu and leave it up for selection. This is often much easier than holding down the mouse the entire time while choosing an item from the menu.
Lists
Most lists in powerada are Extended_Select lists, meaning that multiple non-contiguous items may be selected. A few menus are single-select, meaning only one item may be selected at a time. The main navigator multi-column lists in PowerAda version 3 are third-party widgets and not standard XmLists, but behave much the same with regard to the mouse and key actions below.
MB1 - deselects all other selections, then selects the element under the pointer. If the button is held down and dragged, all elements between where the mouse was pushed down and where it is released are selected.
Ctrl-MB1 - without deselecting other items, selects the item under the pointer (or deselects it if it was previously selected).
Shift-MB1 - selects the item under the pointer and all items between it and the current anchor point (item with focus).
MB2 - in a list widget, this is generally reserved for "drag and drop" functionality, which is not currently supported by powerada.
MB3 - as mentioned above, MB3 will bring up a popup menu in any context which supports one.
Up(Down) arrow keys - move the previous (next) item in the list
Shift-Up(Down) - selects the current item and the item to which the arrow moves. For example, holding the shift button and clicking the Down arrow twice selects three adjacent items including the item having the focus.
Ctrl-Up(Down) - same as plain Up (Down) arrow. However, in the PowerAda 3.1 multi-column list, Ctrl-Up (Down) are the same as PageUp (PageDown).
Ctrl-Right(Left) arrow keys - if the list has a horizontal scrollbar, moves the visible part of the list right (left).
PageUp(PageDown) - Moves up or down by the number of items visible in the list.
Ctrl-PageUp(PageDown) - same as Ctrl-Left(Right) arrow keys: if the list has a horizontal scrollbar, moves the visible part of the list left (right).
Shift-PageUp(PageDown) - selects everything from the current focus to the bottom of the previous (top of the next) page.
Home - goes to the top of the list
End - goes to the end of the list.
Space - toggles selection of item that currently has focus.
Ctrl-/ - selects everything in the list (doesn't work for the multi-column list)
Ctrl-\ - deselects everything in the list but what currently has the focus (doesn't work for the powerada multi-column list).
Text Fields
Text fields for typing information are very common in powerada. Shortcuts for moving the cursor and selecting portions of the text field are described below. (The text field must have focus for these to apply.)
Shift-MB1 - as with list, selects everything from the current cursor position to the pointer position.
MB2 - pastes previously selected characters to the right of the pointer unless the pointer is over a selection. Note that the act of selecting something in the text field puts the selected characters in the clipboard, so you cannot paste a previous selection in place of selected text. Rather you have to delete that text using keystrokes before pasting.
Shift-MB2 - "moves" the current selection to the pointer, deleting it from where it was. Useful for transposing characters or parts of a path.
Shift-Left(Right) - selects (or deselects) the character to the left(right) of the cursor, and moves the cursor left (right). For example, to select just one character, place the cursor to the left of the character, hold down the shift key and type the right-arrow. This is easier than trying to drag the mouse for one character.
Left/Right arrows move the cursor left/right in the text field.
Up/Down arrows move to the previous or next item in a text field for which a history list is kept. This is indicated by an arrow button to the right of the text field. Currently in PowerAda this applies to the Location and Find text fields in the powerada, and the Command text field in adbg.
Ctrl-Left - goes to the beginning of the current word, as delimited by one or more blanks.
Ctrl-Right - goes to the end of the current word.
Delete - deletes the character to the right of the cursor
Ctrl-Delete - deletes from the cursor to the end of all text. For example, if you have something in the clipboard you want to paste in the text field, use Home to go to the start of the field, then Ctrl-Delete to delete it all, then MB2 to paste the new value in.
Home - goes to the start of the field
End - goes to the end of the text in the field, if any
Ctrl-/ - selects all text in the field. If you enter any characters while text is selected, selected text is deleted and replaced by the characters typed.
Ctrl-\ - deselects all text in the field