I noticed that navigating on Windows happens only with ctrl+left alt+<-/->. Both <left ctrl>+<left alt>+<-/-> and <right ctrl>+<left alt>+<-/-> work, but <left/right ctrl>+<right alt>+<-/-> doesn’t work. At the same time, both the command palette and the help document miss this nuance. Please either allow <right alt> to work, or specify that one must use the left alt in both the command palette and in the help docs (especially at the end of Para 1 in Getting Started)
Behavior of right alt key is not unified. Issue is described in AltGr key - Wikipedia
and the consequence for shortcuts in form Ctrl+Alt+… is:
Microsoft recommends that this combination not be used as a keyboard shortcut in Windows applications as, depending on the keyboard layout and configuration, someone trying to type a special character with it may accidentally trigger the application shortcut.
In Obsidian on Windows 7 I changed ‟Navigate back” to Alt+Left and ‟Navigate forward” to Alt+Right so it is faster to press than default shortcuts and is the same as e.g. in Google Chrome or Windows Explorer.
What are the reasons behind choosing Ctrl+Alt+Arrows as default shortcuts in Obsidian?
I am on windows and for my keyboard alt and alt-gr are mapped to the same key. @Richu probably in your keyboard the keys are mapped to different codes.
Thank you for the link @malecjan. I was unaware of OS level differences between the left and right Alt buttons.
Since I am located in India, the English (India) keyboard layout was activated by default, which maps the right Alt to AltGr (http://kbdlayout.info/KBDINEN/). When I switched to the English (United States) layout, the right alt worked as expected.
@malecjan, I would prefer the Alt+<-/-> keys too. I’m a new user who isn’t familiar enough with the keyboard shortcuts and decided to use the default ones till I have a grasp on working with Obsidian. I will be changing them to Alt+<-/-> too. Thank you for the suggestion.