There are times in which I feel a bit too much like the apes beating on the monolith in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. One of those times was… well, this entire morning. For the life of me I couldn’t get the keyboard shortcuts in FDT (my preferred ActionScript editor, by far!) to play nice. I could make a class with Command+Alt+N, but then no matter what I did I couldn’t regain focus in the editor. I found list after list of Eclipse keyboard shortcuts but nothing worked. I was so close to mouse-less nirvana dammit!

But then, on a whim I simple restored Eclipse’s keyboard shortcuts and everything worked… almost. Now, I could open the new class dialog, but no matter what I did I couldn’t tab onto the damn Browse button to select my classes base class. The urge to go find a bone, howl, and beat on the computer was strong at this point. Luckily, before I before I began raiding the company fridge for whatever bone I could find I tweeted about my problem and a follower of my Dominic Graefen (@devboy_org) tweeted back that it was an OS X option! WTF?!?

Turns out Dominic was dead on, it is an OSX option – toggle full keyboard access. It’s keyboard shortcut is Control+F7 – dangerously close (particularly with my flailing about trying to make the editor regain focus) to Command+F7, which in Eclipse changes to the next View. I turned off the system keyboard shortcut and am now happily in Eclipse keyboard nirvana – haven’t touched the mouse in a solid 15 minutes – woo! Thanks Dominic!