Currently, the hotkeys for “Next Search Result” and “Previous Search Result” are Enter/F3 and Shift+F3.
On Mac, those hotkey assignments do not comply with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which stipulates that the shortcuts Cmd + G and Cmd + Shift + G should be used for those actions.
To my knowledge, practically every app on Mac uses Cmd + G and Cmd + Shift + G for next/previous search result; the fact that Obsidian deviates from those hotkeys is highly irritating for Mac users, who are used to press Cmd + G.
Proposed solution
Either change the hotkeys on Mac to comply with the Apple Guideline, or make the shortcuts customizable (and set it to Cmd + G as default on Mac).
Related feature requests (optional)
The following two requests mention customizability of the shortcut, but not as the main topic. They also do not mention that the current shortcuts deviate from the macOS Standard.
This post mentions the issue with Cmd + G and Cmd + Shift + G, but it seems after being requested by the mod to open a separate FR, they did not follow up. (At least I couldn’t find the post, if they did.)
While the issue with the prev/next shortcut was mentioned a few times, it hasn’t been opened as a feature request that the current shortcuts for Obsidian are inconsistent with the Mac Standard / Apple Guideline, which is why I am opening this Feature Request.
please, i keep opening the Graph window when i need to find next in editor!
currently (0.10.1) we can’t assign a key command to this function, it’s hardcoded to F3!
(on macOS it’s common UX to have cmd+G for the Find Next)
Thanks, but I think this option should be core functionality: Cmd-G is pretty standard in MacOS. Being forced to use a Windows standard plays havoc with muscle-memory.
+1 for standard key mapping for macOS. Obsidian is the only app I’ve ever seen on macOS that doesn’t use ⌘-G for Find Next. Nearly every mac app supports these same find option hotkeys:
When searching within a file, the hotkey for finding next/previous instances of a search term is not configurable. It is currently set to “return” or F3 which finds next, shift+F3 for previous.
Proposed solution
On macOS the standard is cmd+f to initiate find, then cmd+g to find next, cmd+shift+g to find previous.
It should at least be an option to use/configure these.
Also: on macOS the standard seems to be that when finding next/previous the text is selected at that point. So if you type, you are replacing the text that is selected. So you could search for “needle”, on the first find the first instances in the document is selected, so you could just start typing “thread”, cmd+g, now the next “needle” in the doc is selected and you can type “whatever”, repeat.
This would something I’d like to see as well, but the hotkey fix is a start.
Great idea!
I use my F keys for global shortcuts, so it won’t work for me unfortunately. These are like 20+ year muscle-memory shortcuts, so I can’t reasonably change them…
Seems like something that should just be fixed in the app.
If you have Keyboard Maestro, you could use its image detection features to click next and previous instead of using the function keys. It’s hacky, but it’d work in the meantime.
