Unfortunately there is no way to specify a tab order. The Tab Traversal Order is not something we are going to modify. I did a lot of testing with this for another customer using requestFocusInWindow(). The Tab Traversal Order swallows all tab events. Based on that, you can only tab through fields left to right, top to bottom. You can manipulate this a little bit by using containers. Now, if you want to use a key besides tab, then you could use requestFocusInWindow() and specify an order to move through the fields.