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Can’t use the control key as a shortcut on Mac
Just wondered if anyone knows why Adobe have deemed it impossible to use the control key for shortcuts on a Mac. The first thing I always want to do with Illustrator is set a keyboard shortcut to hide it. by default, there is (ridiculously) no shortcut for this; presumably the arrogant Illustrator team thought “why would anyone want to hide this wonderful application?”.
Command H is already mapped to ‘hide edges’, so the logical choice is to use ctrl-command-H, like After Effects and Photoshop. But there’s no way of mapping anything to the control key. Does anyone know why? It seems really silly. But then Illustrator is a very silly program.
Maybe this will be fixed later today when Illustrator CC comes out…I won’t hold my breath!
– Paul
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2 Replies
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The Control key on the mac is sort of like an extra function key (like the Control-click). It’s got a specific use. Try option instead of control. On the Mac, they basically replaced the PC “control” key with the Command/Apple key (for example, copy on the PC is Control-C and is Command-C on the Mac) and the Option key even says “Alt” on it. I suspect its now a bit of a sacred cow – the choice, I suspect, was to make the Mac experience different from the PC so they changed the words and the Apple/Command and Option/Alt keys were born. Interesting: some UNIX functions on the Mac require using the Control key – control-C, X, Z, etc. If you replace a Mac keyboard with a windows keyboard, the Windows key becomes the Command/Apple key and Alt becomes Option.
Incidentally, I’m sure you’ve seen this, but you can hide Illustrator by going to Illustrator >> Hide Illustrator. Maybe a script?
Save early. Save often.
Jonathan Ziegler
http://www.electrictiger.com
520-360-8293 -
I agree with you would be nice to have Ctrl an assignable key command, especially since most of the key commands are used up and really not much is left.
I deassign most all of the F commands the mac sues for monitor brightness and such, so I can use them for important stuff to me like F1 = merge colors, F2 = print, save, save pdf to desktop.
not wanting Adobe to sue those keys Adobe not to use those keys. Though I hear and understand your frustration, Apple needs to take leadership on some issues to have a stable system.My best suggestion is to use another key for that, or one of the apple key command like Command tab to cycle through open apps.
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