Question

I’ve found several pages and SO answers about the enter-as-tab problem in Java, but all propose either overriding methods of JTextField or adding a key listener to every component.

But isn’t there any other way? Can’t I override something of the LookAndFeel or install some global policy?

Answer 1

After some documentation crawling I found a solution: It is possible to set the focus traversal keys on KeyboardFocusManager instead of a JComponent instance.

// 1. Get default keys
Set<AWTKeyStroke> ftk = new HashSet<AWTKeyStroke>(
        KeyboardFocusManager.getCurrentKeyboardFocusManager()
        .getDefaultFocusTraversalKeys(
        KeyboardFocusManager.FORWARD_TRAVERSAL_KEYS));

// 2. Add our key
ftk.add(KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("ENTER"));

// 3. Set new keys
KeyboardFocusManager.getCurrentKeyboardFocusManager()
        .setDefaultFocusTraversalKeys(
        KeyboardFocusManager.FORWARD_TRAVERSAL_KEYS, ftk);

This adds the enter key to the list of keys which are used for forward traversal. (Backward traversal similar)