Standardise keyboard shortcuts with other popular programs

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E.g. (using Windows examples)

  1. Alt+left arrow to go back to previous note. (Currently this causes the cursor to move back to the last occurrence of particular punctuation, e.g. “[”. Ctrl+Alt+left arrow is needed to go back to previous note.
  2. Ctrl+g for “find next”. (Let e.g. “Ctrl+shift+g” be “graph view”.)
  3. Ctrl+tab and Ctrl+shift+tab for switching between panes.

Having to learn different sets of keyboard shortcuts and keep them in my head is confusing and inefficient.

Thanks!

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For 1 and 2, you can set your preferred hotkeys in Settings > Hotkeys (e.g. Alt+left for navigate back command). It will highlight if the hotkey will conflict with another command so you can change the other command’s hotkey.

For 3 you can use the Cycle through panes plugin

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Yes, that would work, though there’s always the risk of it introducing conflicts in future.

I think this change is worth making in the default settings.

4

As @DEV_Scribbles said you’ve a lot of possibilities to customize your key-bindings in Obsidian itself.

If you want to go further - on a windows system - you could use AutoHotKey (AHK) which gives you a direct access to the Windows-API, but which you can also use for simple redirecting keys.

There are two ways to react on a key trigger …

  • … the sophisticated or …
  • … the simple one

The sophisticated one is, you identify the program which has the focus and redirect the key to the program key-bindings. This way you can set program independent key triggers, which will do the same or similar things in different programs.

The simple one, which I use, is you define a key trigger in your program and you redirect in AHK your key-trigger to the program key-trigger.

For example, I use [F5] to toggle the left sidebar in Obsidian, therefore I set in Obsidian [ALT]+[e] - I don’t need it for any other purpose. In AHK I redirect [F5] to [ALT]+[e]. It works if Obsidian has the focus, if not [F5] will do whatever the program which has the focus wants to be done.

A code example:

/*
## Obsidian toggle left sidebar
*/
F5::
Send, !e
return

If you are not familiar with this stuff, it may be look difficult, but AHK has a brilliant documentation and a large community.

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