General arrow key navigation

Issue description

It should be possible to use Up/Down in any vertical arrangement of focusable elements and Left/Right for horizontal navigation through link lists.

Developer comments

The navigation should be constrained and should not leave these constraints. Unlike the tab key which can be used to navigate the whole page, the arrow keys should remain in the area (e.g. the menu, the list, the table, etc.

In some cases the arrow navigation establishes a secondary focus, called _highlight_, e.g. in search when the actual focused element (the search input field) should not loose focus.

The secondary focus is problematic, since the browser behavior cannot be emulated perfectly. If a user uses Shift+Enter, the link should be opened in a new window. When Shift+Enter is performed on the highlighted element this cannot be realized, since the focus is somewhere else which means that at most i can call "click" on the highlighted element, but click opens the link in the same window. What if we do not establish a secondary focus, but stay with a single one and use DOWN to simply move into the topics to avoid tabbing over the stuff in between. Then we use ESCAPE to return to the input field.

Works better without secondary focus.

Reporting date

2026-09-04

Reported by

Robert Cerny

Planned for version

Topincs 10.1.0 – next release

Related to

Arrow selection in search(Enhancement)

Work sessions4

Start	2026-09-04T14:00:00
End	2026-09-04T16:48:36
Participant	Robert Cerny

Start	2026-09-05T09:34:19
End	2026-09-05T12:15:06
Participant	Robert Cerny

Start	2026-09-05T15:15:15
End	2026-09-05T16:21:57
Participant	Robert Cerny

Start	2026-09-13T08:20:42
End	2026-09-13T11:32:22
Participant	Robert Cerny