Keyboard shortcuts for text styles almost never work

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Issue in subject line. When I assign a keyboard shortcut to a character style, say Alt + 0 for a format I often use for emphasis, selecting some text and using that shortcut only rarely actually changes the text formatting. It works just often enough to convince me this functionality exists in Affinity, but well under 50% of the time. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to it.

Additionally, when I try to create a new shortcut, Affinity almost never lets me do this. Sometimes literally nothing happens, other times it has a yellow warning triangle next to it which I assume means the shortcut I tried to add is already in use for something else, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for figuring out what or changing it. In the latter case it never, as opposed to rarely, works - the shortcut does literally nothing, neither doing what I set it up to do nor appearing to do anything else that would at least give me a clue what the conflicting function is.

Any tricks I can use to make this function work as intended, or at least be able to know when it will and won't work? Or at a rock bottom minimum, any tips for choosing shortcuts that are intutive and easy to use, but aren't already taken (or at least being able to tell what they're taken by)?

[carl123]

22 minutes ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

other times it has a yellow warning triangle next to it which I assume means the shortcut I tried to add is already in use for something else, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for figuring out what or changing it

Hovering over the yellow triangle will give a pop-up which tells you what that shortcut is already assigned to.

You then need to figure out where in the list of shortcuts it is located so you can change it, if so desired. (Which, admittedly, can sometimes be a bit tricky)

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

1 hour ago, carl123 said:

Hovering over the yellow triangle will give a pop-up which tells you what that shortcut is already assigned to.

That's how I expected it to work, but there was no such tooltip the times I'm thinking of.

[carl123]

3 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

That's how I expected it to work, but there was no such tooltip the times I'm thinking of.

Well, if you notice any lack of tooltips, all you can do is report them as you discover them

[Alfred]

4 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

Or at a rock bottom minimum, any tips for choosing shortcuts that are intutive and easy to use, but aren't already taken (or at least being able to tell what they're taken by)?

The default shortcuts are listed on this Help page, but only the Mac shortcuts, so on Windows you might find it easier to use the Help within the app.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, Alfred said:

The default shortcuts are listed on this Help page, but only the Mac shortcuts, so on Windows you might find it easier to use the Help within the app.

That page will show Windows shortcuts for Windows users so the link will work for everybody.

You can also toggle between showing Mac and Windows shortcuts on help pages by clicking on the body of the page to activate it and then pressing Option/Alt + Left or Right Arrow.

Cheers

[walt.farrell]

58 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

You can also toggle between showing Mac and Windows shortcuts on help pages by clicking on the body of the page to activate it and then pressing Option/Alt + Left or Right Arrow.

That doesn't seem to work for me on Windows, using Firefox, but it depends on some specific Firefox configuration option.

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

That page will show Windows shortcuts for Windows users so the link will work for everybody.

You can also toggle between showing Mac and Windows shortcuts on help pages by clicking on the body of the page to activate it and then pressing Option/Alt + Left or Right Arrow.

None of that applies if you’re viewing the page in Safari on iPad, as I was doing.