Accelerator Key problem in WPF TabControl and Tabitem

This is perfectly accepted behavior which should not prevent access to any other control. The behavior However, you need to resolve key characters (prefixed with "_") used in labels.

Please understand, there is no such thing as miracle. Imagine that you want "Alt+Z" to activate "Zeus" when it is visible, and "Z" to select "Zeus" when some other tab in the same TabControl is selected. This is standard and expected behavior. Is, at the same time, you need "Alt+Z" or "Z" to focus some control like a text box, you should understand that a computer cannot know you real intent: you should choose between focusing a control and selection of the tab.

Let me illustrate this on a XAML sample:

<TabControl>
   <TabItem header="_Veritas">
      <DockPanel LastChildFill="True">
         <Label
             Target="{Binding ElementName=tb}"
             DockPanel.Dock="Top">_Access text box:</Label>
         <TextBox name="tb"></TextBox>
      </DockPanel>
   </TabItem>
   <TabItem header="_Zeus"></TabItem>
   <TabItem header="_Sparta"></TabItem>
</TabControl>

(By the way: why would you post code which does not compile? I know one reason: you cannot use <> in HTML, should replace them with HTML character entities, but why "displaytext"?)

The code above works perfectly: You have Alt+Z, Alt+S, Alt+V and Alt+A to navigate between tabs. If one of the tabs is not only selected but the TabControl is also focused (know the difference between selection and focusing!), you can also use just "Z", "S", or "V" for tab selection.

However, if you replace "_Access text box" with "Let's test _Z" you will loose the effect of "Alt+Z" on focusing of the text box, because this key stroke will shift tab selection (this is also indirectly shifts focus if the text box was focused, because it gets invisible). You cannot expect the same key stroke to do different things depending on what the user wants :-).

If you think that the action of shifting of the tab selection by a key stroke is redundant or less important compared to focusing on search pattern edit box, think again. This is very logical and standard behavior. If you manage to modify it, you only confuses the user. The best solution is finding the accurate set of the characters used the the "_" prefix.

Of course, you can disable tab selection on keystroke simply by removing the "_" prefix before the "conflicting" character, but I would not recommend it. You can achieve the best UI design if you provide logical standard navigation via keyboard with really quick access to all the control via just the keyboard. Any key combinations which are not intuitively obvious should be avoided.

—SA