Mal ,'Our Mrs. Reynolds'
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Is that something native to Macs? Is it something I can change?
It is and it is. In Tiger(10.4), at least, it's an option in the Keyboard Shortcuts portion of the Keyboard System Preference panel. I think for the version you are running is described here.
Huh. Those instructions don't seem to be changing anything for me, Rob. Even after trying to turn on Full Keyboard Access (what is FKA, anyway?), with Control+F1, or even the Control+F7 which also seemed to refer to what I'm talking about, hitting Tab from the post text box still skips right over the Post Message button and goes straight to the Search Thread text box.
None of those commands seemed to change the behavior of my Tab key at all.
Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Huh. Does exactly what you want on Tiger. Turned it on by mistake one time and it drove me nuts until I figured out how to turn it off.
Aaaaaaand in Opera, Tab only switches me between text boxes on the screen (in Firefox, it was rotating between the text boxes, the address box, and selecting the entire page).
I can't tell what any of those are supposed to do, Rob. At least, Ctrl-F1 and Ctrl-F7 don't seem to have any effect at all (and I'm running Tiger).
Apparently OSX for Intel is moving along. [link] notes that 10.4.3 for x86 has been released to developers.
Should be interesting.
According to this page, FKA doesn't work with some "Carbon" applications. Is Firefox one, maybe?
Okay, well I figured out how to make the Tab key thing work in Opera (and possibly Safari, though I haven't checked yet). It's more than just turning on Full Keyboard Access -- I had to go under System Preferences --> Keyboard & Mouse, then click on the Keyboard Access tab. At the bottom of that tab was a "For windows and dialogs, highlight:" radio button that I had to switch from "Text boxes and lists only" to "Any control." Now I can do my Tab --> Enter trick to post. This works whether Full Keyboard Access is turned on or not.
Unfortunately, Jessica, it appears that it doesn't work in Firefox. I just checked.
Unless you use the free utility XPostFacto...
Not on that machine actually. It's a Beige G3 and XPostFacto won't work with the built in video, so it would have to have an aftermarket ATI video card in the machine. Those cost of the video card would be about 4 times what the machine is worth.
Huh.