key focus confusion

[Marc_A]

When you right click on the front panel to create a control, you will see modern, classic, and system. The system palette contains controls that change appearance based on the local computer settings, like you said.

Any control will highlight the entire contents when you tab to it or set the key focus. In order to select only part of it you will have to use a property node. Under the properties for a numeric control, go to numeric text -> selection and from here you can set where the selection starts and ends.in the case of a timestamp, there will always be the same number of characters, so this should be easy. If you set start to 0 and end to 2, you will select the hour. 3 and 5 for the minute, etc.

[jspaarg]

Thanks Marc!

That solved the issue of everything being highlighted.

However, it still has the box around it.

It doesn't have a box when you just tab to it in an app, but setting focus does create the box.

Is there a separate focus for the app that behaves differently?

Thanks again for the selection.

[MarredCheese]

I see this thread is years old, but I was wondering if anyone ever figured out how to get rid of the box that key focus ads to controls?  See the attached picture showing how key focus makes my pretty string control ugly. 😞