mvw • one key does make a difference

I’ve started out on the Mac, but with Adobe’s consistency across platforms, I have no issues with jumping over Windows once in a while. That being said, I do take issue with one of the frustrating things about customizing shortcuts on the Windows side of things. We have one less modifier key available to us, doh!

I’m just experimenting with formatting blockquote. You can safely ignore my nonsense…

As a result, it’s much more difficult to come up with a personalized list of keyboard shortcuts that are not already in use by other commands within Adobe InDesign…

keep reading”

As Bob mentions below, there is a fourth key on the Windows side. Appropriately named the Windows key. Not being a Windows expert, I believe this is relegated to system-wide function, and cannot be utilized by applications like Adobe InDesign.

The beautiful part, on the Mac side, is that the keyboard shortcuts involving the ctrl key rarely, if ever, are programmed within Mac applications. In this case, it opens up an a rather large range of possibilities for those running good ol’ Mac OS X. Sadly, that same opportunity is not available to Windows users.

August 30, 2008
Filed Under all, rant

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Comments

4 Responses to “mvw • one key does make a difference”

  1. Bob Levine on September 2nd, 2008 8:40 am

    The site looks great, Casey.

    Just a quick note on the above. The modifiers on Windows are Alt, Ctrl, and Shift.

    You might also want to take note that there’s a quasi-corresponding key on Windows to the Mac Control key.

    Usually referred to as the Windows key, there’s a lot of keyboard shortcuts that use it on the operating system level. AFAIK, however it can’t be used at the application level.

  2. casey on September 2nd, 2008 8:57 am

    Thanks Bob, I made the edits ;)
    It looks like I was rushing a little bit when I wrote the post. I did a copy/paste and forgot to change the rest of the text.

    To be honest I was just using it as a filler to view my CSS formatting. Oh well, I suppose I need to cross my i’s and dot my t’s from now on…

  3. Bob Levine on September 2nd, 2008 9:08 am

    When you get a plug on InDesign Secrets you gotta expect lots of hits.

    And I knew exactly what you did…ah, to have a dollar for everytime I did the copy/paste thing and forgot to edit it. :)

  4. Bruce Weese on September 11th, 2008 2:56 pm

    One more key - this time MAC is missing it. Windows keyboards have a backspace key and a delete key. Oddly enough Mac only has a delete key which equals windows backspace key. This is problematic when needing the three-finger-salute on a Mac running Windows which exist in my work environment. This means you need the onscreen keyboard which on a mac is Apple+U and on the windows keyboard it is Windows+U. Just sayin…

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