Tab key navigation in JavaFX TextArea

Question

How do I make hitting the Tab Key in TextArea navigates to the next control ?

I could add a listener to cath de key pressed event, but how do I make te TextArea control

Answer 1

Inspired by the previous answers and for a very similar case, I built the following class:

/**
 * Handles tab/shift-tab keystrokes to navigate to other fields,
 * ctrl-tab to insert a tab character in the text area.
 */
public class TabTraversalEventHandler implements EventHandler {
    @Override
    public void handle(KeyEvent event) {
        if (event.getCode().equals(KeyCode.TAB)) {
            Node node = (Node) event.getSource();
            if (node instanceof TextArea) {
                TextAreaSkin skin = (TextAreaSkin) ((TextArea)node).getSkin();
                if (!event.isControlDown()) {
                    // Tab or shift-tab => navigational action
                    if (event.isShiftDown()) {
                        skin.getBehavior().traversePrevious();
                    } else {
                        skin.getBehavior().traverseNext();
                    }
                } else {
                    // Ctrl-Tab => insert a tab character in the text area
                    TextArea textArea = (TextArea) node;
                    textArea.replaceSelection("\t");
                }
                event.consume();
            }
        }
    }
}

I just have not seen the necessity of handling tab in the context of a TextField so I removed this part.

Then this class can be very easily used as described by User:

TextArea myTextArea = new TextArea();
mytTextArea.addEventFilter(KeyEvent.KEY_PRESSED, new TabTraversalEventHandler());

And the whole thing works like a charm :)