Friday, March 16, 2012

GanttProject hacks: keyboard shortcuts

This post opens a short series of posts on configuring GanttProject.

Many people use mouse or touchpad when they work with GanttProject, but many are accustomed to keyboard and can do a lot of operations way faster if application supports keyboard shortcuts. Well, GanttProject is probably not the most keyboard-friendly tool, but there are keyboard shortcuts and you can redefine some of them if you don't like the default ones. We do our best to give you good default value, though!

You probably know that Delete deletes what is selected, Insert inserts a new task or resource, Alt+Enter opens properties dialog, Tab indents a selected task, Shift+Tab outdents it.  There are also a few shortcuts for the menu actions, they are written in the menu itself. For instance, standard Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V work with clipboard: copy, cut, paste.

But we have more.

Alt pressed with arrows Up/Down moves tasks and resources up and down. Alt and arrows Right/Left indent and outdent tasks.

Ctrl pressed with Space expands or collapses selected tree node, Ctrl+E does the same.

Ctrl pressed with PageUp or PageDown cycles through the tabs, and it works both in the main window and in the properties window.

In the next post I'll write how to redefine the keyboard shortcuts and mouse button bindings.