Building a Keyboard-Driven Charting and Manual Trading Toolkit

Summary

This article outlines the first part of a reusable MetaTrader toolkit for manual chart analysis. The author favors drawing trend lines and related structures directly on charts, and proposes keyboard shortcuts for common tasks such as adding lines, switching timeframes, selecting price extremes, and managing orders. The planned drawing tools include Fibonacci fans and several Andrews’ pitchfork variants, with adjustable rules for identifying extreme points.

The article focuses on the initial software structure: a main class receives chart events, while helper classes group graphics, mouse-position data, utilities, and shared variables. It shows how an Expert Advisor can forward chart events to the library and how the mouse helper converts cursor coordinates into chart time, price, and bar position. This installment mainly describes architecture and setup; most drawing functions and the graphical settings interface are deferred to later versions. The author also notes that using an Expert Advisor rather than an indicator avoided slowdowns in their own setup, while acknowledging other causes may have contributed.

Key ideas

• The toolkit is intended to speed up manual chart analysis through keyboard-controlled drawing and chart operations.
• A main event-handling class delegates work to helper classes for graphics, mouse data, utilities, and shared variables.
• Mouse event data can be translated into chart coordinates, price, time, and bar index.
• The first installment establishes a cross-platform MQL4 and MQL5 structure, while leaving most tools for later development.
• The author reports possible slowdowns when combining an indicator with another Expert Advisor, based on personal experience.

Tags

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.