GizmoStudios

The CMD+D is actually a nice suggestion, better than escape in my opinion and you can assign it, yay! The reason you'd like to get out of text edit mode is so you can type a shortcut. As long as you stay in text edit, all shortcuts will be shown as letters Clicking outside means stop typing, grab the mouse, move it out of the way, and click. That's 4 actions... hardly optimal. And then it sometimes starts a new text entry. But the CMD+D can be changed to be CMD+Return so it pretty much does the trick. It's a little different from ESC that you loose the selection/transform frame from the text but you can start using shortcuts again, so thank you!

It's not that it's more work than pushing another button, it's just that it's the ESCAPE button (ak CANCEL/ABORT/STOP/GET OUT/PANIC), even Apple removed this button in favor of a context aware touch strip, so it's even trickier to find the button. If it was just an option in the shortcut settings, where you can pretty much set anything else the way you like, we could stop this whole discussion and everyone can just set what they think works best for them. And I would like to believe Affinity is a company that promotes choice and user optimization :)

Anti in that I have to be careful not to hit escape in other programs since it has the opposite effect.

Clicking on another tool... most people (including me) use shortcuts to select tools. But you can't use any shortcut since you're still in editing mode, and the only way to get out is to use the escape key (which is cancel/undo in other apps) or grab the mouse and click another tool, which is time consuming rather clunky when you are a shortcut user. I'm done arguing here actually.. my custom hotkey with BetterTouchTool works somewhat, and I don't have any hope that this gets changed or implemented anyway seeing how defensive staff/other users get when I (and others) try to point out that it's not nice that we can't set a shortcut other than escape to do this.

I make a big deal out of this since a lot of apps I own (most Adobe apps) cancel out of your edit when hitting escape, which I think is expected behaviour. It's called ESCAPE for a reason, and it should be used as a cancel action. It wouldn't be such a big deal if you could assign another shortcut to it yourself, but for some reason this is not possible while you can configure most actions as you like. If I have to learn to use escape to get out of editing mode, then I have to learn NOT to hit it in other apps, so again I'll call it what it is, anti-pattern. Call it a good convention all you want and that Adobe is wrong, but 3 years ago this thread was opened, since it confuses a lot of people and it is silly that we don't at least get the option to choose which shortcut to use for this.

I really beg to differ, people do want to get out of edit mode in an efficient way. It kind of bugs me that users talk about quirks and bugs, but Affinity staff takes a defensive stand explaining why we, the users are wrong and you are right. There's a good reason why this convention is used in ALL other applications, and it's plain weird that you have to use ESCAPE to get the desired action. If you hit ESCAPE in another tool you cancel out of the edit, so it really is an anti-pattern. There's also a mention of the "V" typos in text because you want to switch to another tool pressing a shortcut, but you can't because guess what.. you're still editing text, and you have to grab your mouse to click out of it. Keyboard > Mouse > Keyboard is not efficient. But ok, I made my point, and offered an actual solution for those who agree and want better working workflow editing text. Thank you for your rapid response in how it all behaves as it should, and we should simply adapt to quirky UX behaviour.

Actually I've found a way how you can emulate the functionality using BetterTouchTool. I tried with a shortcut first, which shows the transform handles again but you stay in text edit mode. Using the Key Sequence it works, and you can cancel out of editing and get the transform handles. Still I hope this becomes native behaviour in a later version, but for now this is the way to do it. Hope it helps!

March 2019... To this day it still annoys the frikkin' hell out of me, the steps required to just get the transform controls back after editing the text is ridiculous unless you hit escape. And Escape for Apply is the biggest anti-pattern I've ever seen, since in most tools (surprise surprise) it cancels out of your adjustments, and you have to do it over again. So learning to use the Escape button for Apply is actually messing with me using any other tool. Please.... PLEASE change this behaviour so you can use CMD+Return to get out of text edit mode, or at least set your own shortcut in the settings.