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Panel Shortcuts should not Toggle Visibility


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Hi,

While I appreciate the Affinity apps aren't clones of the Adobe apps, I don think the approach to customizable keyboard shortcuts and menu toggling visibility is wrong for professional users.

I taught Adobe CS/CC for many years as a Certified Expert/Instructor and the approach used in those apps is more intuitive and productive.

As an example, let's say F5 has been assigned to the Swatches panel in InDesign and Publisher.

    - Press F5 in InDesign and the Swatch panel will become active regardless of whether the Swatch panel is currently visible and/or active (frontmost).

    - Press F5 in Publisher and the Swatch panel will show/become active only if it is not visible in the Studio. If the Swatch Panel is visible but not active, for example, it will be hidden and will require a second keyboard press to make it visible and active.

This behavior in Publisher is counter-intuitive and slower than the Adobe approach.

Moreover, Publisher does have the right approach in some default keyboard shortcuts such as Cmd+T to bring up the Characters panel.

In Publisher, if you press Cmd+T, it will always make the Character panel visible and frontmost, which is the behavior I strongly suspect most professional users will expect and want for all panels.

My suggestion then:

    >> Make the assignable keyboard shortcuts for the Studio panels function in the same way as Cmd+T does in Publisher. Or, at least, make this a Preference so users can choose.

Thanks,

Pat

 

PS - I previously brought this up in this discussion thread for Publisher.

 

 

 

 

 

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Command+T is attached to an option in the Text menu, which is specifically labelled "Show" character.

The only option I see for the Swatches panel is under the View -> Studio menu, and the purpose of those options is to allow control of the visibility of the panels, not to bring them to the front - the toggle behavior makes sense there and the shortcuts as currently implemented should match the behavior of the menu options.

 

I think ultimately Serif needs to consider making it possible to assign shortcuts to things that are not in the menus, and options to show a panel (rather than toggle its visibility) in cases where there is no equivalent in the menus would be a good candidate for this.

The other option would be to handle this via scripting, which is another commonly requested feature.  Shortcuts could be assigned to scripts, and scripts used to implement the desired behavior with respect to the visibility of the panels.

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6 hours ago, fde101 said:

I think ultimately Serif needs to consider making it possible to assign shortcuts to things that are not in the menus, and options to show a panel (rather than toggle its visibility) in cases where there is no equivalent in the menus would be a good candidate for this.

Serif has already considered and implemented assigning shortcuts to things that are not in menus.The Tools, Node Tool, Pen Tool, Text Input, and Miscellaneous sections within the keyboard shortcuts are additional shortcut options that are not part of the menus. With that framework already in place, I think additional suggestions such as in this thread could fit in easily.

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