Keyboard Shortcuts

Many of the menu commands for the jstools applications have keyboard shortcuts, which appear in brackets beside the menu entry. To invoke a keyboard shortcut, hold down whatever the Meta key is on your keyboard, and press the key in brackets. (The Meta key is labelled differently on different keyboards; it may be marked `Meta', `Alt', `Mod', or something else. On current Sun keyboards, it's marked with a little diamond.) You may also need to hold down the Shift key; in jedit, for instance, Meta-s is `Save', but Meta-Shift-S is `Save As...'.

Occasionally, a keyboard shortcut uses the control key rather than (or in addition to) the Meta key. For instance, the `Refresh' command in jbrowser has the command equivalent Control-l (that's a lowercase letter ell). The control key is indicated by a caret, so `^l' after a menu entry means that the shortcut for that command is Control-l. (`^L' would mean that the shortcut was Control-Shift-L. `[^L]' would mean that the shortcut was Meta-Control-Shift-L.)

A few keystrokes have special functions in dialogue boxes. Generally, pressing Return will do the same thing as clicking the default button, often `OK' . (To remind you of this, the default button is displayed with a little sunken rectangle around it.) Pressing Control-c, Control-g, Meta-q, Meta-period, or Escape will normally do the same thing as clicking the `Cancel' button.

In the Find and Global Preferences panels, Tab lets you jump from field to field without clicking.

In the File Selector panel (which you typically get from a `Load...' or `Save As...' command, pressing Tab will complete a partially­typed filename as much as possible, as in Emacs and the tcsh(1) shell.

Custom keyboard commands for editing may be defined in your ~/.tk/textbindings.tcl file, and depending on the application, you may be able to define additional keyboard shortcuts in an application­specific startup file.