There seems to be no easy way to have TAB and shift-TAB act just as
normal focus traversal keys for a JTextArea/JEditorPane.

BasicEditorPaneUI/BasicTextAreaUI remove/add them depending on whether
the text component is non-editable/editable (BasicTextUI.updateFocus-
TraversalKeys) from the set of focus traversal keys, i.e. non-editable
components *always* have them, editable ones *never*.

I just want TAB (iff it is the "normal" focus traversal key) to act
as a focus key. I almost never want the user to insert tabulator
characters in plain text, and never in HTML-like text displayed by
JEditorPane.

Some thoughts:

1. Surely it should be configurable whether one wants the user to
inserts tabs (or, more generally, to have TAB handled by an editor
kit action), or whether it it should be a focus key.

Never mind the specifics, should it e configurable whether the focus
traversal keys are overridden (no matter what for)?

2.

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4838730.html

What was the bug? What is "closed, fixed"?

3.

I can add a KeyListener for TAB and then call transferFocus() etc.
manually, but
- it is not processes as a normal focus key: It is not handled by
KeyboardFocusManager.processKeyEvent
- more specifically, it does not consume the corresponding key-
Typed automatically (can this be done by hand?), that seems to be
all done by DefaultKeyboardFocusManager
- it is executed later (after InputMethodListeners and some other
pre-processing) in event-distribution.
- at the moment it seems to be hard-coded to TAB.

Christian