Identical default shortcuts for Healing and other Brush Tools

[Alfred]

While playing with the Inpainting Brush Tool, I hovered over its icon on the toolbar flyout and saw 'Inpainting Brush Tool [J]'. So the next time I wanted to use the tool, I pressed the 'J' key on my keyboard and was surprised to see an alert about the Healing Brush Tool, telling me that I must use Click+ALT to select a source.

 

On further investigation, it turns out that all of the tools on that flyout have the same default keyboard shortcut, so the first tool is selected when the user presses that key.

 

[MEB]

That's by design Alfred. The shortcuts will cycle through the tools on the same group. The Mac version works the same way.

[Alfred]

Thanks, Miguel. It seems a little inconsistent that multiple presses of a shortcut key invokes different behaviour if the tool is not in a group, but I'm sure I'll get used to it!

[MEB]

Hi Alfred,

You can configure/change them as you see fit in the Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts section (Photo | Tools dropdown). You can have one shortcut for each tool as long as you have enough keys on the keyboard...

[Alfred]

Thanks again, Miguel. :)

[MauricioC]

What is truly frustrating is that we have to work with speed and accuracy. I am looking at the art when I work. I count on the shortcut key to work AS EXPECTED, and not whatever flavor of the day the shortcut key seems to want to offer. I'll be painting with a brush, select a color with the wand, I go back to the brush and it won't paint, again and again because it defaults sometimes to "color replacement" brush or "pixel tool" there seems to be no rhyme or reason. All I know is that I have to stop my inspired brushstroke to figure out what went wrong. It would make sense to have the shortcut default to the last use tool IMHO.

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, MauricioC said:

What is truly frustrating is that we have to work with speed and accuracy. I am looking at the art when I work. I count on the shortcut key to work AS EXPECTED, and not whatever flavor of the day the shortcut key seems to want to offer. I'll be painting with a brush, select a color with the wand, I go back to the brush and it won't paint, again and again because it defaults sometimes to "color replacement" brush or "pixel tool" there seems to be no rhyme or reason. All I know is that I have to stop my inspired brushstroke to figure out what went wrong. It would make sense to have the shortcut default to the last use tool IMHO.

That should only happen if you press the B shortcut while you already have the Paint Brush Tool selected, which by default will then switch to one of the tools that shares taht shortcut.

In any case, you've responded to a very old topic, and in 1.7 you can solve that by enabling the new Preferences option that requires use of the Shift key to cycle between tools in the same group:

If that doesn't fix it for you, and you need to discuss this further, I'd recommend starting a new topic in the Questions area.