Move away from textbox using tab button

Question

I was wondering about this for quite some time now.

This applies to pretty much every software that has multiline inputs at some point, but I will give an example with a webpage since it's "more universal".

Let's say you are filling up a form in a web page. That has the following fields:

• A single line text input named "username"
• Another one named "email"
• A big "comments" section represented by a textarea.
• A "Visible" checkbox input.
• And finally a "Submit" button to complete the submission (obviously).

Let's say that you use the mouse to focus on the first input.

You type in your username and click Tab to move to the next input.

You enter your email and again move to the next input using Tab. Your cursor is now sitting on the glorious "comments" textarea and start typing a comment. As long as you are finished, you hit tab and realize that instead of moving to the checkbox, you insert a tab character in the textarea while the cursor remains hooked.

Is there any combination of keys to move out of the textarea, when the Tab button inserts a tab character?

P.S. As I see while typing this question, the textarea SO provides allows moving to the next field with the Tab button, so it has something to do with Javascript. What can be done to other software though?

Answer 1

I've tested this on IE, Firefox and Chrome. Ervery browser i tested will focus the next element if tab is pressed in a textarea. There is a question Use tab indent in textarea (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6637341/use-tab-to-indent-in-textarea) which adresses the opposite problem.

Maybe your question is related to Windows Forms (VBA in Access, Excel, etc.) but that's only a guess.

Could you clarify your question that we know which "other software" you mean.