Pixel Tool shortcut resets to "B" every time the Designer opens

[Gonza]

•    What is your operating system and version (Windows 10, OSX Mojave, iOS 12 etc)?
  • macOS Big Sur 11.1
  • Affinity Designer 1.8.6 (trial version)

 

•    What happened for you (and what you expected to happen)
  • I want to remove "B" as a shortcut for the Pixel Tool, so it doesn't swap to Paint Brush Tool if I accidentally hit B twice.
  • Every time I open the Designer, Pixel Tool has its shortcut set to "B".

 

•    Provide a recipe for creating the problem (step-by-step what you did).
  • remove the shortcut "B" for Pixel Tool.
  • close Affinity Designer.
  • open Affinity Designer again.
  • Pixel Tool has its shortcut set to "B" again.
  • also tried:
    • Saving the shortcuts as a ".affshortcuts" file.
    • Closing Affinity Designer.
    • Going to "~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Affinity Designer" 
    • Replacing the "shortcuts.affshortcuts" file with mine.
    • Opening Affinity Designer.
    • The Pixel Tool is set to "B" again (it seems it's always reset to "B"?)

 

•    Any unusual hardware (like tablets or external monitors or drives that may affect things) or relevant other applications like font managers or display managers.
  • Second monitor ASUS, using HDMI cable
  • Wacom Intuos tablet

 

•    Did this same thing used to work and if so have you changed anything recently? (software or hardware)
  • No

[walt.farrell]

First, welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Next, the solution to your problem of the B key alternating between tools is this Preference option:

 

I'm not sure why your shortcuts change isn't working, unless possibly you haven't actually installed the program, and are running the installer each time. To install, you need to Open the DMG file, then drag the Affinity Designer application into your Applications folder. Then you close the DMG file, and run Designer from Applications.

[Gonza]

Hi,

Thank you for the tip on that preference check, didn't know about that!
Yeah I definitely dragged the app from the .dmg into the apps folder.

I also installed the free trial of Photo to check it out, and it works ok in there.
When I removed "B" from the other brushes shortcuts and left only the Paint Brush Tool,
it stayed like that after closing and opening again... So maybe it's a bug in the Designer?

Thank you for the warm welcome!

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, Gonza said:

When I removed "B" from the other brushes shortcuts and left only the Paint Brush Tool,
it stayed like that after closing and opening again... So maybe it's a bug in the Designer?

Or, perhaps you're not setting the keyboard shortcuts properly. You can change it separeately for the Designer Persona and the Pixel Persona? Which did you change, and which are you having the problem with?

(There's also a keyboard shortcuts option to change a shortcut in all applicable Personas; perhaps you didn't enable that?)

[MEB]

Hi @Gonza,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
There's indeed some issues with the shortcuts. If you remove the shortcut for the Pixel Tool, then select it draw something press B (it changes to the Paint Brush Tool which is correct since its shortcut remains active) but then press B again it reverts to Pixel Brush Tool which it shouldn't since the shortcut was removed (not a bug). Thanks for reporting this. Issue logged to be looked at.

[Gonza]

Thank you @walt.farrell and @MEB for your responses!

Also notice that I didn't face this issue in Photo, so maybe that's a lead to fixing it?
Have a great week!

[norbinw]

Thank you for the shift solution. Also is there a way to sample a color on the fly when using the brush tool? It's complicated to press "I" then click on sampled color in the color tab, then paint, and do this over and over when you need a quick blend in pixel persona...

[Gonza]

@norbinw you can sample colors on the fly with the option key in mac, just like you'd do in Photoshop.

[Gonza]

On 1/18/2021 at 1:41 PM, MEB said:

Hi @Gonza,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
There's indeed some issues with the shortcuts. If you remove the shortcut for the Pixel Tool, then select it draw something press B (it changes to the Paint Brush Tool which is correct since its shortcut remains active) but then press B again it reverts to Pixel Brush Tool which it shouldn't since the shortcut was removed (not a bug). Thanks for reporting this. Issue logged to be looked at.

Yeah basically what I experienced wasn't Designer just returning back to the latest selected tool.
What was happening to me is that "B" was set as a shortcut, in preferences, for Pixel Tool.
Even after I explicitly removed it.

This only happened after re opening Designer, and it didn't happen to me using Photo.

Hope this helps!

[MEB]

Hi Gonza,
The removal of the shortcut not being honoured after a restart is already logged to be looked at. The strikethrough part of my post is expected behaviour.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "[macOS] Keyboard shortcut for Pixel Category > Tools doesn't save after a restart" (REF: AF-206) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.3.0.2083".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.