More keyboard input for PluginGuis

As a developer it’s currently very difficult to provide a good user experience for plugin guis with the very limited methods of input capturing available. Recently we got PluginActions as a way to create keyboard shortcuts, but they aren’t a perfect solution.


I have a “Go to” plugin for searching for and opening scripts. The plugin was designed to be a simple and quick search tool but a lot of it’s utility is lost by requiring the user to navigate it with the mouse. The addition of PluginActions gave me a way to capture the search bars focus, but that’s not working great either. I can’t use arrow keys or tab to sift through my search results, and I can’t use enter to open the scripts I have selected.

in the video you can see an example of the UX I have right now vs. the goal. I can achieve the same results but one requires me to reach for my mouse to navigate my search results while the other lets me do all my navigation without moving my hand more than an inch to reach the arrow keys.


The plugin also features selection mirroring with the default explorer. I can currently select (in the default explorer) script and watch my plugin display those selections in it’s search results, but I can’t multi select scripts in my plugin explorer due to a lack of keyboard input gathering.

In the video I showcase the use of default keybinds for duplicating and deleting selected explorer objects and how the selection is mirrored in my plugin. I can use the key binds for those actions just fine, but I can’t select multiple scripts to use those actions on like how I can with the default explorer because I can’t listen to key presses.


If I had the ability to listen to keyboard input at any time I would be able to check off those last few UX improvements my plugin needs to reach it’s full potential. It would finally be the keyboard driven search plugin I had wanted to create.

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