Numpad enter & keyboard shortcuts

[Poziomka]

I'm having trouble creating a keyboard shortcut.

In Publisher on windows, I try to add num enter as a keyboard shortcut for column break but Return (Central Enter) registers.

It looks like Affinity doesn't recognize which key was pressed!

Most typesetting programs distinguish between enter and return!

Any idea how to get around this? Currently I use alt+enter but maybe there is a better idea?

[Aammppaa]

I asked for the numpad to be recognized over 4 years ago.

Never had any recognition from Affinity team that this was even noted or considered 😞

 

[Old Bruce]

Here on Mac OS 10.14.6 I use an extended keyboard and the Return Key and Enter Key are treated as the same. As are the Number Keypad numbers and the 'regular' number keys. I really wish Affinity programs would be able to differentiate between them as this would open up new shortcuts for those of us using extended keyboards.

[Poziomka]

Independent recognition of the keys from the numeric island is the basis of work. Most personal shortcuts in many programs require the numeric part because the main keys are already taken.

Maybe Affinity developers will hear us?

[Mr. Doodlezz]

Hey guys,

nice to see that I'm not the only one who would like to use the NumPad for shortcuts! 😃

After seeing many threads with great ideas like this one, I can't help but feel that a lot of the community's ideas are overlooked and ignored when directly approached by the moderators (»I'm not responsible for that matter and I can't/won't name/forward this to a responsible person ...«) so that Affinity/Serif only implements what the company and its employees think is important. At least that's how it feels.

Sure, performance improvements are great and the (staff) euphoria about special features like astrophotography is nice.
But I haven't had any problems with performance for years (fortunately) and – like probably a large part of the user base – have absolutely no use for astrophotography stacks. In fact, I had never heard of astrophotography before the update. Good for them!

As a long-term user, at this point I'm frankly just disappointed. Submitting what feels like basic and easy to implement ideas and requests/improvements for features like this that end up gathering dust unheeded just feels like a dull waste of time by now. 🤔

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, MrDoodlezz said:

After seeing many threads with great ideas like this one, I can't help but feel that a lot of the community's ideas are overlooked and ignored when directly approached by the moderators (»I'm not responsible for that matter and I can't/won't name/forward this to a responsible person ...«) so that Affinity/Serif only implements what the company and its employees think is important. At least that's how it feels.

I think it is mostly that there are far more suggestions for new or improved features than the developers could possibly implement in a reasonable amount of time even if they doubled or tripled the size of the development staff. Also, often what seem like easy to implement is not, requiring considerably more rewriting of the underlying code & debugging than users think it should.

Besides, everybody (including the mods!) has a list of the features they most want to see implemented ASAP, but everybody's list is different. Personally, what I most want is not any new feature; it is thoroughly debugging the ones we have now.

[RichardMH]

14 hours ago, MrDoodlezz said:

Hey guys,

nice to see that I'm not the only one who would like to use the NumPad for shortcuts! 😃

After seeing many threads with great ideas like this one, I can't help but feel that a lot of the community's ideas are overlooked and ignored when directly approached by the moderators (»I'm not responsible for that matter and I can't/won't name/forward this to a responsible person ...«) so that Affinity/Serif only implements what the company and its employees think is important. At least that's how it feels.

Sure, performance improvements are great and the (staff) euphoria about special features like astrophotography is nice.
But I haven't had any problems with performance for years (fortunately) and – like probably a large part of the user base – have absolutely no use for astrophotography stacks. In fact, I had never heard of astrophotography before the update. Good for them!

As a long-term user, at this point I'm frankly just disappointed. Submitting what feels like basic and easy to implement ideas and requests/improvements for features like this that end up gathering dust unheeded just feels like a dull waste of time by now. 🤔

On my Windows machine I can use numpad keys as shortcuts, different from the keyboard numbers.

[Petar Petrenko]

It would be nice too, to have shortcuts for Studio presets instead of applying them via menus.

[Andy05]

14 hours ago, MrDoodlezz said:

Sure, performance improvements are great and the (staff) euphoria about special features like astrophotography is nice.
But I haven't had any problems with performance for years (fortunately) and – like probably a large part of the user base – have absolutely no use for astrophotography stacks.

Whilst I appreciate that the developers try to take care of performance and stability issues with each update of the Affinity suite, I completely agree about adding new "fancy stuff" rather than implementing missing essentials for a design suite. From a marketing prospective, astrophotography might have been a useful step. But in my point of view, this belongs to an app, which is dedicated to this theme. 

I still wonder, if the "astro feature(s)" attracted more paying users than things like often requested direct features which currently require more or less excessive workarounds (if doable at all) would do. Or things like e. g. true vector brushes, non-destructive envelope warping for both vectors and pixels which have been requested for years. 

On top of this, some issues exist for years now, which I honestly cannot understand. A recent example, which I stumbled across again just yesterday:

Seriously, one might expect such lack of basics in an app from a new company, but here? I've seen that for some users the question arises here and there, whether the developers have any real designers among their team or if they just know the technical aspects of programming. And I have to agree. Oftentimes it seems like the devs very well know how to code a design suite, but lack the experience of the designing market itself.

That said, I still prefer Affinity over other apps and I can do 80-90% of my jobs with it. But there are still so many trivialities to find workarounds for most of the time.

[PaulEC]

I have to agree that I would much rather Serif worried a bit more about fixing bugs and adding basic features (fixing dashed lines, adding footnotes/endnotes in Publisher etc.), rather than adding new things like Astrophotography tools.

[Mr. Doodlezz]

On 9/18/2021 at 12:36 AM, R C-R said:

I think it is mostly that there are far more suggestions for new or improved features than the developers could possibly implement in a reasonable amount of time even if they doubled or tripled the size of the development staff. Also, often what seem like easy to implement is not, requiring considerably more rewriting of the underlying code & debugging than users think it should.

Besides, everybody (including the mods!) has a list of the features they most want to see implemented ASAP, but everybody's list is different. Personally, what I most want is not any new feature; it is thoroughly debugging the ones we have now.

Sure, but then I ask myself:
Why pretend the forum is a platform for collecting suggestions for improvements and for new features that the community actually wants/needs, when apparently only the internal agenda counts and dictates which new feature will be implemented next or which bugs are getting fixed? 🤥

I really can't remember a single feature that was implemented due to requests from the community (however, if this is the case, it has not been mentioned publicly).

To me, feedback/bug fixing on basic, already existing features seems less important than the next hot sh*t for publicity at the next Apple event. 😑

 

I don't just want to vent my frustration here, but also admit that many many new features are great and make the work immensely easier! 😉
But often it's the little things that were buggy from the start and finally need some love and tweaking.

Greetings

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, MrDoodlezz said:

Why pretend the forum is a platform for collecting suggestions for improvements and for new features that the community actually wants/needs, when apparently only the internal agenda counts and dictates which new feature will be implemented next or which bugs are getting fixed? 🤥

There is a forum for that. They consider all of the hundreds of requests for different features posted there, but for what should be obvious reasons they also have to consider how many users would benefit from each of them, how much development work each would take, how difficult it would be to support each of them across all the apps & all supported OS versions, & how much effort it would take to debug each of them without adding any bugs to the existing features.

IOW, it is all part of their agenda.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, MrDoodlezz said:

I really can't remember a single feature that was implemented due to requests from the community (however, if this is the case, it has not been mentioned publicly).

Suggestion: first, go here. Then start clicking through to the various release notes for the different versions. It should not take you long to discover quite a few features users have asked for, among them Studio Presets, the Resource Manager & improvements to it, the select same options, the contour tool, blend nodes for mask layers, & many others.

[Intuos5]

I am quite bummed to see there is no differentiation between the numeric and numpad keys, so many different pieces of software seemingly neglect the importance hereof solely in terms of options it opens for customisability. I would also appreciate it if the /, *, -, +, numpad enter and . key would be treated as numpad [key]. Whether one is working with a separate numpad or full fledged keyboard, either way, a drawing tablet takes considerable space and using these keys is vital for a tighter desk organisation as well as for productivity enhancements and customisation. Please add support for this!

[PaulEC]

27 minutes ago, Intuos5 said:

I am quite bummed to see there is no differentiation between the numeric and numpad keys,

As it's becoming more common not to have a separate numpad (not only on laptops but also on some normal keyboards), I wonder if this is a deliberate move by Serif so as not to alienate some potential users? 

[Old Bruce]

35 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

As it's becoming more common not to have a separate numpad (not only on laptops but also on some normal keyboards), I wonder if this is a deliberate move by Serif so as not to alienate some potential users? 

For a long time some software makers have included the ability to detect the absence/presence of a Number pad and have dynamically altered their Keyboard Shortcuts. In essence there are two sets, one with Number pad and one without Number pad. I think the Affinity suite of applications would benefit from including this ability, and I would also love to have the ability to export a human readable set of the current shortcuts. Look at Apple's Logic application for a very good setup of the export ability plus searching for applied keys etc etc.

[Intuos5]

59 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

As it's becoming more common not to have a separate numpad (not only on laptops but also on some normal keyboards), I wonder if this is a deliberate move by Serif so as not to alienate some potential users? 

That does not legitimise the choice of not supporting the numpad for those that have one. That's like not supporting a drawing tablet, simply because some people only have mice.

[PaulEC]

I wasn't saying that I think it's a bad idea to support using the numpad for shortcuts (it's one thing I miss from PS), just musing that it could be one reason not to do so. Perhaps a good compromise would be not to use it for built-in shortcuts, but to allow it's use, as an option, for user created shortcuts. One thing I particularly miss is being able to use the main return key just as a return, and use the enter key, on the numpad, to "accept" something.

[Intuos5]

That would be an option and a checkbox somewhere in the preferences indeed. But first we need support!

[R C-R]

Assuming the apps supported separate number pad based shortcuts, how should this work when loading a saved a set of shortcuts that includes separate number pad ones onto a computer that does not have a keyboard with a number pad, or visa versa?

[Intuos5]

26 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Assuming the apps supported separate number pad based shortcuts, how should this work when loading a saved a set of shortcuts that includes separate number pad ones onto a computer that does not have a keyboard with a number pad, or visa versa?

It would be treated just like any other, you wouldn't want to convert them to the number row since that may lead to conflicts. With the non-numeric keyboard option checked, you should then be prompted with a conflicts message, say an orange triangle instead of yellow, to indicate that certain keys are not useable within the configuration.

Now then: if a search option would be implemented to search for commands that are assigned to a certain key, it would be possible to search for "numpad" and retrieve the orange triangle keys. The user could then reassign the keys in question. Shouldn't be too difficult from a user perspective, right? Rather quite convenient as it works both ways.

Seriff could provide the non-numpad layout as default (and an expanded one for the numpad). That would be non-exclusive.

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, Intuos5 said:

It would be treated just like any other, you wouldn't want to convert them to the number row since that may lead to conflicts.

How would this work when loading a set of shortcuts that includes ones using the number pad keys onto a computer that does not have a keyboard with a number pad? There would be conflicts only if the app remapped the number pad keys to the regular keyboard keys, so that is easy to avoid. But that removes what could be a large number of shortcuts, so if there are not many shortcuts unassigned on the regular keyboard, it might be a good idea to assign infrequently used shortcuts to those using the number pad for any saved set that might be loaded onto a computer with no number keypad.

[Intuos5]

Actually, if the orange triangles are not resolved by the user, they would be ignored and be listed in the shortcut file. That way they are always there if they need to be, while providing the option to resolve them manually. Also note there would need to be duplicate entries for keyboard shortcuts, so the numpad keys could be redundantly assigned. In other words, you could have "Numpad +" for zooming, in addition to "Ctrl +". So this would entail adding a plus icon in the shortcut preferences to add additional entries for a command. But for now most of this is only to take account for any possible conceivable problem, which isn't really necessary for the implementation and well functioning of differentiating between numeric and numpad keys.

[Old Bruce]

29 minutes ago, R C-R said:

... that removes what could be a large number of shortcuts,...

And that is where we are currently. I vote for more. I would be happy with none in the default set, I can setup my own.

I am aware that in the future I may not have an extended keyboard and I would lose all the ones I set up. No conflicts, just a loss of functionality until I get an extended keyboard back.

[R C-R]

22 minutes ago, Intuos5 said:

Actually, if the orange triangles are not resolved by the user, they would be ignored and be listed in the shortcut file.

I am not sure what you mean by that. I am suggesting that when loaded onto a computer that does not have a number keypad, the app just ignores any shortcuts using those keys. There would be no warning triangles because there would be no conflicts, but also no way to show any shortcuts that used those keys.