Have Enter key behave like Tab in QTableWidget

Question

I'm using a QTableWidget in PyQt5 and Qt Designer to create a data entry table. What I'd like is a simple way to make the "Enter" keyPressEvent to move across the table like the Tab button was pressed. The following code captures the Enter key press event. How do I make it move the cursor?

def keyPressEvent(self, ev):        
    if ev.key() in (QtCore.Qt.Key_Return, QtCore.Qt.Key_Enter):
        print("Enter key pressed")

Answer 1

Instead of using keyPressEvent that is low level you should use QShortcut + focusNextPrevChild() as shown below:

import sys
from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtWidgets
from functools import partial


class Widget(QtWidgets.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(Widget, self).__init__(parent)

        self.tableWidget = QtWidgets.QTableWidget()
        self.tableWidget.setRowCount(4)
        self.tableWidget.setColumnCount(2)
        for i in range(self.tableWidget.rowCount()):
            for j in range(self.tableWidget.columnCount()):
                it = QtWidgets.QTableWidgetItem("Cell {}{}".format(i, j))
                self.tableWidget.setItem(i, j, it)

        self.layout = QtWidgets.QVBoxLayout(self)
        self.layout.addWidget(self.tableWidget)

        for key in (QtCore.Qt.Key_Return, QtCore.Qt.Key_Enter):
            QtWidgets.QShortcut(key, self.tableWidget, partial(self.tableWidget.focusNextPrevChild, True))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = QtWidgets.QApplication(sys.argv)
    ex = Widget()
    ex.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())