Thursday, January 17, 2008

Delphi Tips and Tricks: Selecting Tool Palette Items

There is a really easy way of selecting items in the Tool Palette from the keyboard: CTRL + ALT + P then just type the component you want.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why are these shortcuts not put on the buttons as tooltips? Useability, useability, useability! You need to get some developers in before each new release and watch what they can find out for themselves using only the new version and more importantly, what they miss. If users never find a feature, then you might as well not have spent the time adding it.

Unknown said...

This has a bunch of the IDE shortcuts documented.

http://dn.codegear.com/article/33805

stanleyxu (2nd) said...

Thanks for the important tip. The new Tool Palette fits for keyboard freak ;-)

There are several shortcomings:
1. Delphi integrates more than 30 component categories. If you prefer to select a component by clicking mouse. It is very difficult to select a component from the last couple of categories. Usually you have to scroll down the panel first.
2. If you prefer to type-and-find. You have to know the name of the component, you are looking for. Developers, who are not English native speakers, have to make sure they can spell the name correctly.
3. Although you know the name of the component, you MUST know CTRL+ALT+P as well. Otherwise, you have to focus to Palette panel with mouse and then use keyborad and then switch to mouse again. It is inefficient.

I hope there is a chance to get the classic Tool Palette back in D2008.

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