Joe White’s Blog

In Delphi, Ctrl+Tab moves forward to the next editor tab. In Visual Studio, Ctrl+Tab is more like Alt+Tab, moving to the tab you were most recently using.

It looks like Delphi actually supports something similar to the Visual Studio behavior — just with a different keystroke. If you press Ctrl+B, Delphi pops up the list of files currently open in the editor, sorted by “most recently focused first” — and when the dialog opens, the second item in the list is selected.

In the screenshot, my current editor tab is SpriteSpecs.pas. Before that, I was working in Screens.pas, and before that, I had done a Project > View Source to edit Tyler.dpr. That’s not the order the tabs are listed above the editor — Ctrl+B shows them in the order I used them last, just like the Alt+Tab window list or Visual Studio’s Ctrl+Tab list. And notice that, when the dialog opens, the second item is selected by default.

So the equivalent of Visual Studio’s Ctrl+Tab would be Ctrl+B, Enter. The equivalent of holding Ctrl down and pressing Tab twice in Visual Studio would be Ctrl+B, Down arrow, Enter. Not bad. Not bad at all.

The only downside is, Ctrl+B only works when the focus is on the editor window. If the focus is in a docked window, MS Visual Studio is nice enough to let you Ctrl+Tab back to the editor. Delphi isn’t so thoughtful; there doesn’t appear to be any reliable way to use the keyboard to get the focus from a docked window back to the editor. (If the current editor tab is a form or frame, you can hit F12 once or twice. Otherwise, reach for that mouse.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Delphi, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.