Why are we forced to use mouse?

It looks like BSS is hardwired to be used with a mouse (much like Asphalt 8 and FIFA). Coming from a very long programming background, I find it extremely inefficient. Although there are some keyboard shortcuts available, one (or at least I) cannot do the following important tasks from keyboard:

  1. Moving between panes: Oh well, this one is so fundamental. Not only that we should be able to Tabify through panes, there should also be shortcuts to quickly move focus to a particular pane.
  2. Menu: Again neither the ALT + Key combination, nor F10 appear to open main menu.
  3. Adding components: Once focus is inside the components tree, pressing ENTER should add highlighted item as a child of selected component.
  4. F2 should work as Rename shortcut in all panes. CTRL + TAB should be used to switch between design files.
  5. TAB key should move focus between controls (textboxes, checkboxes, buttons etc.) in ALL panes.

With these few shortcuts, you guys can make our lives MUCH easier and make BSS a very fast tool. Hopefully someone from the BSS team will read this and take action soon.

+1 to all of the above!

And if possible also add arrow navigation in design view - I build a lot of tables, and having to constantly move hand to mouse to switch table row or column is irritating.

  • Michael

Good question! My suggestion to the team is to create some way of a keyboard shortcuts customizations, with the hopeful possibility of adding shortcuts. Something like a table: keyboard shortcut <=> menu action, so that every user can tailor shortcuts by her/his preference. For quite some time I'm painfully switching between two simultaneously opened files, while at the same time editing one of them. Terrible!

+1 Although I don't use half of what many of you use for shortcuts, i too would love the ability to program them as we want them to be rather than how someone else wants them to be. Everyone works differently, I'm a mouse person mostly, but basic shorcuts I use all the time for saving, copy/paste, things like that.

+1 Moving around the Overview tree is already implemented (I just realized it myself after typing up a +1 for it lol), looking over the current shortcuts and it's there and works pretty slick actually. I'm not usually an "arrows" using person, but it's better than nothing. - My additions here would be to be able to open and collapse the tree with the "Enter" key or Ctrl+Enter or simlar, which would save having to use the mouse clicks for any of this navigation with a bit of practice for me lol.

For those of you that aren't aware of the current shortcuts, you can get to that in the help list where it will open this link for you: https://bootstrapstudio.io/pages/keyboard-shortcuts

That's the list of the current ones (well, not sure how current it is, but the main setup is there I'm sure).

For me working without some of the necessary shortcuts is a health issue. I'm an invalid, and although I have both hands, I use only left. By continually taking a mouse to do some simple task, which ought to be supported by some keyboard shortcut - that's terrible. At least they should broaden their offer of the shortcuts, instead of bragging with those provided by Windows SDK.

Thank you for all the great suggestions! We will work on improving how keyboard navigation works in 4.5.x. Ideally it should be possible to navigate the interface entirely using the keyboard. Things like Delete and Enter should also do the right thing depending on what's focused (for example they should delete or open the selected file in the design panel, if this is where the focus is). Customizing shortcuts would also be a good addition to the app.