It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs

jeffvyduna — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 06:17:30 GMT

I'm a long time Fusion user; Inventor and Mechanical Desktop before that. This is my first community post.

It's way overdue for the tab key to advance the selection in dialog boxes (extrude, revolve, sweep, split - anything where you always need to pick two or more types of entities).

You have lots of staff currently building stuff that some of us will sometimes need, but everyone uses these dialogs frequently, and many of your users care deeply about the efficiency we lose every day.

It comes up in this community again and again and again and again and again and again and again, outliving the careers of well-meaning Autodesk UX staff pushing for action, but it never gets implemented. Some of those threads are brushed aside for "not enough community support", but do most things you've released in the last 8 years (which are much more complex to build) really have more threads of disappointed users begging you to build them?

I've been a PM; I'm sure there's some ambiguous cases that have just jammed this up, or there's a highly respected internal senior person who hates this. Someone brings up how it needs to be consistent across all Autodesk products or every dialog in Fusion and it dies because it sounds too big for any quarter's KPIs & OKRs. And you're so tired of having this discussion that you're thankful community forum threads archive so users can't revive the same zombies with "X years and still no..." Well, a tab/advance key working in the 20 dialogs you can figure it out for is better than the current state of affairs.

The official keyboard shortcut guide has no conflict for the tab key. If you're twisted up about the conflict with multi-dimension entry fields, there's many good solutions:

Tab through those, then to the next entry in the dialog box. If we need to go back, we can shift-tab or use the mouse.
Offer a tab modifier. Ctrl/Cmnd-tab is in use, but others are not. I'd even be delighted with a 3-button combo, like option/alt-ctrl/cmnd tab.
Give us some other keyboard shortcut to do this besides tab
Let us assign the keyboard shortcut we want to this

The worst solution is 8 years of no solution.

PS. I'm not just always angry. Thank you for the rest of Fusion. It's wonderful, really, and gets better regularly. I especially appreciate how the stability has improved over the years, even if you never reply to the crash reports where I give my email address - sorry I swear so much in those.

Re: It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs

tommVS2MB — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:34:27 GMT

That is an interesting/different way of asking for functionality.

Best wishes.

Re: It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs

TrippyLighting — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:48:13 GMT

I would re-phrase the title of this thread to:

It's time for serious work in Design dialogs.

That includes tab-to-next-field, but doesn't stop there.

There is a lot of inconsistency across the different dialogues.

That is getting more obvious if a user works across different disciplines such as design, CAM and electronics.

topic Re: It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs

Re: It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs

Re: It's time for Tab to work in Design dialogs

It's time for serious work in Design dialogs.