I notice that occasionally all of the elements in the GPanel become unresponsive sometimes.

When the panel is collapsed then all controls on it are disabled. The controls are not re-enabled automatically when the panel is expanded, this has to be done programmatically by the user. This is the designed behaviour.

In the next version of G4P when the panel is collapsed the enabled and visible state of any controls on it are remembered. When the panel is restored the original state is restored.

In fact the next version of G4P is a complete re-write of all the controls, in particular there is significant improvement in the text based components. For instance the current  textfield control has been split into 2 classes GTextField for single line text input and has an optional horizontal scrollbar for long text. The other is GTextArea for multiline input with both horizontal and vertical scrollbars. The scrollbars are also new in that behave just like the real thing. Both classes support italic, bold, super/subscri[t and other text attributes.

Try it out the new text area control here.

So that is something to look forward to.

Ah, ok, I guess I overlooked that.  Thanks!

How about 'tab' to go to the next field in a Panel?

I assume that you mean TextField and TextArea controls as it only makes sense to tab between controls that respond to key presses.

The usual practice is to give each (suitable) control a tab index (integer) and on 'tab' move to the next highest index.

The problem is how are the tab index values determined. A common practice is assign them in the order the controls are created but this is restrictive. The other approach is to allow the user to specify the tab index for each control but then the software needs to make sure there are no duplicate values and that the indices are maintained in sequence.

Other things to consider - what if there are more than one panel with text controls?

It is an interesting problem and I will see what can be done, if you (or anyone else) have any thoughts on how 'tabbing' should work in the GUI then post something here.