Be able of using the Function keys (F1-F12) to perform -> Functions <-

[cristian]

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Use case or problem

1. I cannot assign an ‘F’ key to a command.
2. I cannot assign hotkeys to a layout in the Workspace plugin.

I really want to assign different layouts of the Workspace plugin to the ‘F’ keys, so I can change perspective easily and quickly, to a graph view, todo view, etc.

Proposed solution

1. Allow the use of F2 to F12 as a hotkey

Current workaround (optional)

I don’t know.

Related feature requests (optional)

[cristian]

Hello Anyone there?

[Craig]

Hi @cristian , fellow user here. Although assigning F3 doesn’t seem to work, I can assign Ctrl-F3, Shift-F3, etc.

Hope this helps!

[cristian]

Hi Craig, thanks

But I wanted to use the function keys alone (no modifier) to perform functions. (Probably that’s why they are called function keys)

For example, in the IDE I use to program I use F1 to ‘search for everything’ and F2 to ‘rename’ It feels natural, and it’s far more quickly.

I think there is a way to ‘hack’ this by changing the config.

[quinn]

function keys do not seem to be supported.

[memetic_contagion]

not entirely true, you can assign a key combination with a function key such as Shift+F1(currently using this to open settings), but your right on assigning the key by itself.

[udracing]

I think someone else mentioned it that you can edit the hotkeys.json directly.
For example, I assigned Shift+F1 to “open homepage” and then deleted “shift” from the json

When you go back to settings it shows F1

[Syphdias]

Thanks, that worked. It’s important to note that you need to keep the empty string in the modifiers list and in my case I also had to close Obsidian and reopen it.

[phrostbyte]

Greetings all!

tl;dr Version: Chillax!, to anyone who is too impatient for a fix to this! I don’t like the inability to bind functions to function keys without mods, either. But we should be patient. It’s not always easy to implement, unfortunately. And I’m going to make myself be patient. They said they will eventually fix it, I believe, so let’s relax.

The “Whole Tomato” Version:

I’m SO glad I’m not the only one who is annoyed by this small yet consequence-laden problem. It’s obviously not a bug, and as a fellow computer programmer I can both understand and sympathize with the developers of Obsidian when it comes to having hundreds of feature requests, bug fixes, improvements and other issues to deal with, so I’m not complaining.

But I can also understand how, if I were not familiar with the problems of modern software and release engineering, end users might see this as a “simple fix”. Indeed, I am a bit frustrated myself that this hasn’t been addressed yet after several years of using Obsidian. I have few if any complaints regarding the application in general or any of its features and plugin API, but one or two “small” issues like this do tend to make it hard to find enough keybinds for the various plugins (community and base) I use as well as those of the core program.

In summary, I simply want to say “me too” to the complaint that it’s currently not possible to assign a command to a function key without any modifiers (i.e., Alt, Ctrl, Shift, Cmd—for those cursed enough to use Apples or iOS, willingly or through coercion ). If it were a modern day programmer’s version of Fermat’s Last Theorem or something similar, I would not even mention the issue, of course!

But since in most modern desktop applications and API’s it’s a very simple matter to implement the capability to assign a piece of functionality to almost any key, including not only F-keys but even the Windows key (there are one or two exceptions), I admit to a very slight amount of annoyance. The plain, simple fact is that the vast majority of applications that allow the custom binding of keys to functions also allow the assignment to function keys (with or without modifiers), so it’s a bit disturbing, at least aesthetically, that Obsidian does not, as yet.

That being said, I must admit I’m fairly unfamiliar with the Electron API or indeed even the JavaScript language (although I’ve begun to study the modern “WebDev” stack), having spent the majority of my development life and career learning and using, for example, C/C++, (x86/64) Assembly language, Java and Perl, bash scripting, i.a., so I can obviously understand how it might not be so simple a matter to implement when dealing with a modern Web scripting language like JavaScript.

Anyway, I could go on and on ad nauseam, but I won’t waste any more of the reader’s time or bore you with more of my long-winded tedium. (I just don’t have the time to type/write as much as I like lately; forgive me)

My primary reason for putting in my “two cents”—to myself: quickly, before it becomes my 300 cents—on this problem, after all, was simply to thank the Obsidian developers, this forum’s outstanding moderators (esp. Whitenoise, et al.) and the Obsidian plugin community at large for the hard work and time expended, as well as to hopefully quell anyone who might (like me) be disturbed at the issue, but (unlike me) not understand why it is potentially troublesome to implement a “fix” to it.

Until it is fixed, I’m sure we can all adapt to the problem of having a slightly smaller inventory of keys available to bind our commands to, and I wish everyone well. Also, please do forgive my long-ass, novella-length comment. As I said, I just don’t have nearly enough time to write (one of my very favorite things to do) lately, and didn’t mean to waste time. I would have edited the comment more than once, to shorten it, but—believe it or not—I’ve known people who actually complain if you edit a comment, for some unknown reason. O.o Well, TTFN.

[iGondor]

+1 to this request - it would be excellent to be able to re-map hotkeys to be more similar across applications, e.g. using F1 in VSCode to open the command palette, it would be much less mentally taxing by making this more consistent.

Cheers

[cristian]

Also, I would like to know -why- is adding this functionality so difficult. This particular issue convinced me to move to VS-Code with plugins instead of Obsidian.

[WhiteNoise]

This will be implemented in 0.15.3.