Customizing keyboard shortcuts

You can customize shortcuts on an application-wide or on a per-Persona basis. Shortcuts can be customized for tools, menu items, panel switch on/off, and tool operations, either being added as new shortcuts or replacing existing shortcuts.

You can optionally save your customized shortcuts to a file (.affshortcuts) that can be shared with other users or backed up for safe keeping.

You can optionally save your customized shortcuts to a file (.afshort) that can be shared with other users or backed up for safe keeping.

Available settings are as follows:

Persona—The pop-up menu sets the Persona for shortcut customization.
UI Element—The pop-up menu displays the menus, commands and operations for the currently selected Persona. A Miscellaneous category groups shortcuts for commonly performed operations and lets you switch on/off panels via shortcuts.
Apply to all—If checked, the shortcut applied to a UI element is shared across every Persona. If unchecked, you can uniquely assign a custom shortcut to work just within the currently selected Persona in the initial Persona pop-up menu.
Ignore Modifier—Lets you create shortcuts using a single letter designation instead of using keyboard modifiers.
Reset—All customized shortcuts are reset back to default.
Serif Defaults—All customized shortcuts are reset back to default.
Apple Defaults—All customized shortcuts are reset back to default with some exceptions: shortcuts for adjusting character spacing, baseline and paragraph leading, moving the insertion point within text and selecting text are set to macOS defaults.
Clear All Shortcuts—All default and customized shortcuts are removed.
Load—Loads a previously saved .affshortcuts file. This will overwrite your current keyboard shortcut allocations.
Load—Loads a previously saved .afshort file. This will overwrite your current keyboard shortcut allocations.
Save—Saves the current set of shortcuts to a .affshortcuts file for sharing or backup.
Save—Saves the current set of shortcuts to a .afshort file for sharing or backup.

To assign (re-assign) a keyboard shortcut:

From the Affinity Designer menu, select Preferences.
From the Edit menu, select Preferences.
Select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
From the initial two pop-up menus, filter shortcuts by Persona and then by UI Element, respectively.
From the lower shortcut list, click in the box (containing empty or existing shortcut) at the end of a shortcut entry for the shortcut you want to change.
Press your chosen keyboard key(s) to assign. This adds the new shortcut or overwrites the assigned shortcut.

To delete a keyboard shortcut:

Click the cross-hair icon at the end of the shortcut entry.

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