Keyboard shortcuts

Eleven keys to move around the panel and govern the plan without taking your mouse off the chart — and none that can send an order.

With the chart focused:

What's NOT there, and it's half the design

There's no key to arm. There's no key to send. There's no key to close.

It's not an oversight or a pending feature: it's the guarantee. What can't be named can't be pressed by accident.

Inside the program, the actions a key is allowed to request form a closed list, and on that list "arm," "send" and "close" don't exist. Even if someone mis-wired a key, there'd be nowhere to wire it to.

The three levels of danger

Every keyboard action is classified, and the classification is checked by sweeping all 256 keys:

The check is exactly that: that no key reaches "moves money," and that at most one reaches "authorises."

And it's three levels and not two, for a reason. It used to be a yes/no — "does it move money?" — and Enter didn't fit either side: calling it harmless hides what it does, and calling it "moves money" would make the one claim that can be proven false.

Why Esc exists and its opposite doesn't

Esc disarms. It moves towards the safe side, and that's why it can be a key.

Arming moves towards the side that takes on risk, and that's why it doesn't have one. It's the same asymmetry as the whole product: getting out is always possible; getting in, not always.

Why Enter is safe even though it authorises

Confirming sends nothing. It leaves the trigger ready for a click that's still needed, and that authorisation:

• expires after 90 seconds
• dies if you move the plan

And on a MetaTrader chart Enter does nothing by default, so the key doesn't take the place of any terminal function.

Up to 9

The number keys go up to 9 even though there are seven tabs today. Pressing 8 or 9 does nothing: there's no eighth tab, and the program knows how to say no to a tab that doesn't exist.

It stopped at 5 for a while, because on that day there were four tabs and one was spare. When TRADES and DASHBOARD arrived, the last two could only be reached with the mouse — and no alarm went off, because there was a check that required exactly that: that 6 do nothing. It was written when that was still true.

Nine and no further because those are the single-digit keys. With ten tabs it would take a different gesture, not a different key: 1 would be ambiguous while waiting to see if a 0 follows it.

And the drawing canvas has its own, separate

The above is the panel's program (STC_Atajos.mqh), with its danger classification swept over all 256 keys. The drawing canvas — the one you open from DRAWING or from the chart's shortcut — is a different program and has its own keys, without that same danger classification because it sends no orders:

And in the mosaic (the three timeframes in one window), with the mouse over it: arrow keys to move, Home/End for the edges, PgUp/PgDn and +/- to zoom in and out.