So imagine a custom panel with an <input> or <textarea> field. You're typing along, everything is fine. A bunch of regular A-Z 0-9 keystrokes, they all work just fine as expected But... suppose you want to nudge the cursor through the text you're typing: left/right arrows. Frequently (though not always) instead of the cursor moving left and right, the Timeline panel's playhead might nudge forward and backwards. It's a little more dramatic with Cut and and Paste Cmd-X, Cmd-V, where instead of cutting and pasting in the <input> element it's happening to your sequence -- literally removing / adding edits to your sequence instead of text in the panel. For those who like living dangerous that's good adrenaline, but it can be a death blow to a deliver deadline. Here's what's going on: Clicking on the HTML / body area of a custom panel doesn't automatically activate (create the blue outline around) the panel itself. In other words, you can interact with a custom panel without activating, leaving some other panel still active. Note: The panel can be manually, forcibly activated by clicking the tab area at the top of the panel, but until that moment the panel operates in a kind of in-between state where some keystrokes interact with the panel, others with whatever other panel in Premiere remains highlighted. This is not standard behavior in any other Premiere panel. If you click anywhere in a Timeline, Program, Project, Mixer or any other panel, by default the panel is fully activated. To recreate this issue: Load any custom panel. Then click on any other panel in the project to activate it (outlined in blue) Then click on the custom panel, not the tab area at the top, but the main area where the content is. Notice that it does not activate (highlight in blue). Keystrokes subsequently typed will affect the still-highlighted panel. Looking toward a solution Is there a command, either in JS or JSX that might be employed to force panel activation? The closest thing I found so far is a 2018 post hoping for such a command, but it wasn't looking promising. Per Bruce B it was put in as feature request B-125639 with the suggestion to check back after NAB and ask "Hey, whatever happened to API feature request B-125639?" I'm thinking it might finally be post NAB 2018 and ok to follow up on that question.
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