# User Interface Overview

As you have undoubtably already discovered, poEdit's main window consists of three parts: there's a list of string-translation pairs in the list in the upper part of the window, and two text entries under it. The first of the text entries holds the original string and is not editable, while the second is where you type your translations. The list is separated from the text fields with a splitter sash that you can move up and down to adjust how the screen is split between the list and the input fields.

There are two UI navigation modes built into poEdit and they differ in keyboard navigation handling. The first of them (the default) leaves the focus in the list, while the other redirects it to the text input field. In the first mode, the list behaves like an ordinary list control and you have to press Tab to change focus to the text field before you can type in translations, and press it once again to bring focus back to the list and move to another translation. This is done automatically in the second mode -- its drawback is that you can no longer use arrows for list navigation and have to use an alternative method described below. The 2nd mode is enabled by checking Always change focus to text input field in Preferences.

When the focus is in the text field, you can use Ctrl-Up/Down arrows and Ctrl-PgUp/PgDown keys to move up and down the list of messages. This works in both modes; it is the only keyboard navigation that works in the second mode (because the list never gets focus, you naturally can't use arrows without Ctrl modifier in this mode). This feature is particularly useful in the first mode where it eliminates the need to repeatedly press Tab.

You will see that some items have different color than others in the list. This is meant to simplify navigation in the catalog -- untranslated strings are in blue and are always at the beginning of the list. Fuzzy translations are in yellow (see poEdit and Gettext Basics if you don't know what fuzzy means). You will notice that `not translated' and `fuzzy' marking is changed when editing translation, so you needn't worry about it in most cases.

Sometimes, there's a small icon to the left of the entry in the list. There are currently three kinds of icons: a small green dot that indicates you modified the entry in this editing session, a pencil icon which means there's a comment attached to the entry (see menu description) and finally a gray picture of a computer that is only shown if you updated the catalog and had configured poEdit to automatically roughly translate new entries (see settings and Translation Memory section).

You can right-click on the focused item to display a list of references (i.e. places in the source code where the given string appears) and open the file that contains the given string. This is useful if you are not sure in what context the string is used. The same functionality is available via the Edit/Show references menu command. The same popup menu will display suggested automatic translations if this feature is enabled (see Translation Memory section).

See Menu and Toolbar for a description of toolbar icons.