bmoeskau

Look, this isn't a hill I really feel liking dying on -- at the end of the day, the software designers can do whatever they please. It's fine. But, two things. I'm old enough to remember the days when people were switching in droves from Word Perfect to MS Word. The MS developers were smart enough to provide a complete crosswalk key mapping from WP to Word. Did they do it because WP had the perfect set of keyboard shortcuts? No -- in fact, they were optimized for terminal style usage (pre-Windows). They did it for one reason -- to make it dead-simple for WP users who had years of muscle memory to switch. That's it. They wanted to reduce friction / increase adoption, and it worked like a charm. Secondly, there's a thing in software called the Principle of Least Astonishment. Simply, software should behave consistently and predictably. Granted, you can argue that within Affinity's tools, whatever behavior they dictate is by definition consistent and predictable, given no other constraints. However when you are explicitly positioning yourself against the 800 lb gorilla in the space, and wooing users from their platform to yours, the POLA applies in the sense of making things minimally surprising in general, for all users. The reason I commented in this thread about this issue specifically is because the sequence of events for me went like this: T <type some text> Cmd-Enter (muscle memory) <go on with doing other stuff, use a few tools, etc.> T again (to edit previous text) Click on the previous text. Click again. Double-click. Scratch head. <5 minutes pass trying to figure out what's going on> Realize text is now a bunch of random shape layers. Scratch head again. Shrug, delete text and type it all again I literally did that entire sequence 3 or 4 times over a few hours before finally coming here in desperation, thinking I was going nuts. Now that I know about this, fine, I can remap the keys as you mentioned. Great. But as someone wanting (really) to switch happily from AI, this was extremely surprising (read: frustrating) in the POLA sense. Again, in summary, it's fine I'll deal with it. Just letting you know where I'm coming from.

It's pretty clear that people fleeing Adobe-subscription-land are a huge demographic for these products. As such, I would think making it as frictionless as possible to switch would be a priority (especially with commands as common as exiting text edit mode). Just my two cents, obviously it is what it is.

Yet another "weird" choice considering how many people are certainly coming from Photoshop. Cmd-Enter is an autopilot command for me when switching from text editing to default selection mode. I *never* would have guessed this is the reason my text is no longer editable after the first time I create it. Bizarre choice!

So to add my voice into the wind that is this 2-year old topic, it's a bit strange to not have this feature that is "standard" in every image tool I can recall. I literally downloaded this trial, pulled in a screen grab that I needed to trim, and not having an obvious crop option was the first issue I ran into. The crop tool "works" but is not the same thing. I don't need to preserve the cropped image non-destructively. I don't want to choose a tool, then pull down from one corner, then pull up from another corner, then click Apply. I want to do what I always do in PS: M -> draw a box -> crop. Bang, done. It's really not that hard! As I'm sure you know, it's all about efficient workflow, and for you, also attracting PS and other tool users. This is such a simple and common action it's a bit mind-boggling to me that it's missing after all this time. As a trial user new to this tool it also makes me wonder what other little bits of weirdness I might run into.