Keyboard shortcut for "Edit note" changed with 1.1?
 

I recently upgraded to 1.1, and noticed that "enter" (not "return") no longer is the shortcut for "Edit note," as it once was. It seems the new shortcut is command-apostrophe.

Unfortunately, my muscle memory is hard to re-train. Is there a way I can re-train OmniFocus to use my old shortcut? Thanks!

(Bonus question: Does anyone know why this shortcut changed?)

[QUOTE=IntlOrange;40691]I recently upgraded to 1.1, and noticed that "enter" (not "return") no longer is the shortcut for "Edit note," as it once was. It seems the new shortcut is command-apostrophe.

Unfortunately, my muscle memory is hard to re-train. Is there a way I can re-train OmniFocus to use my old shortcut? Thanks!

(Bonus question: Does anyone know why this shortcut changed?)[/QUOTE]

This got me too - muscle memory is a potent thing.

-P

See the release notes, or Ken's post [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=8626"]here[/URL].

I don't know the answer to the bonus question, but suspect it might be a reaction to confusion where users expect Escape to cancel editing.

[QUOTE=IntlOrange;40691]I recently upgraded to 1.1, and noticed that "enter" (not "return") no longer is the shortcut for "Edit note," as it once was. It seems the new shortcut is command-apostrophe.[/QUOTE]

I could have sworn Command-' was the key combo for editing notes all along; or at least that's the shortcut that was displayed to the right of the menu option.

So it's not like Enter was [B]the shortcut[/B], but rather [B]a shortcut[/B] for editing notes. :)

To be honest, I didn't even know the Enter key could be used to edit notes. I'd always used Command-'.

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;40716]I don't know the answer to the bonus question, but suspect it might be a reaction to confusion where users expect Escape to cancel editing.[/QUOTE]

I'm confused. Did the Escape key not work if you opened a note with the Enter key? AFAIK, it has always worked as a way to exit from editing a note when the note was opened with with Command-' shortcut.

From reading the release notes, I got the impression that mention of the Escape key was not directly related to the Enter key, but rather that the use of Escape might be "phased out" in a future release. So OG is providing a hidden default to allow us to get used to the change ahead of time.

Incidentally, one nice side-effect of using that new default to turn off exiting from edit mode with Escape is that now the Escape key can be used for word auto-completion (standard for most OS X text views). Formerly, you had to resort to using F5.

-Dennis

[QUOTE=Toadling;40735]
I'm confused. Did the Escape key not work if you opened a note with the Enter key? AFAIK, it has always worked as a way to exit from editing a note when the note was opened with with Command-' shortcut.[/QUOTE]

I'm confusing. :-)

I didn't finish my sentence. I meant to say that I suspect the change might be a reaction to confusion where users expect Escape to cancel editing and Enter to confirm it.

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;40737]I meant to say that I suspect the change might be a reaction to confusion where users expect Escape to cancel editing and Enter to confirm it.[/QUOTE]

Okay, that makes sense. That actually occurred to me about 15 minutes after I posted and saw something similar mentioned in another thread. But thanks for clarifying.

-Dennis

Thanks, Curt, and everyone else.

The problem is that I have years of practice with OmniOutliner, a program that also uses the Enter key to switch between an item and its note. Moving to OmniFocus for project/action management was easy because it kept a lot of OmniOutliner's keyboard commands. Now I worry that OF is diverging from OO, and my muscles will have to learn new commands and learn how to use different ones for each app.

Shouldn't be a problem - OmniOutliner also will open/close the notes field on a row with cmd-' just like OmniFocus. If you look at Edit->Edit Note in either app, you'll see cmd-' listed as the keyboard shortcut.

I'm also a longtime OmniOutliner user, and even there I always used the Command-' shortcut to edit notes. Like OmniFocus, OmniOutliner displays that key combo in the Edit -> Edit Note menu option. Apparently the Enter key did the same thing but was undocumented?

I wonder if these changes are a result of some of the feedback generated by the Matt Neuburg TidBITS review and subsequent usability discussions. If I remember correctly, there was some discussion of using the Escape key to cancel edits.

-Dennis

Okay, sounds like for the benefit of usability best practices everywhere, I will have to retrain my fingers to adapt to the technology. :-)

We'll also be changing this keyboard shortcut in OmniOutliner. (But in both OmniFocus and OmniOutliner, we'll provide a hidden preference so you can change it back if you wish.)

Is there a way (yet) to have Escape actually cancel? When I set the preference to "force myself" to use Escape, it now does auto-completion. Which I understand is a standard Mac-ism, but (as a new Mac user) that's gotta be the dumbest standard Mac-ism I've ever seen. Escape, since the dawn of terminals, means, well, escape! I feel like a customer being hounded by a salesperson: "Are you sure you want to leave? Maybe you'd just like a different product? What if I give you a free month?"

Is there some way - via escape, or another key - to say "take me out of editing mode and undo anything I've just typed"? Undo is the obvious alternative, but it's sluggish, it sometimes takes a few repeats to do anything visible, and it doesn't always leave me with the right selection/field focus.

Please don't reassign "Escape" to something else, or I'll have to relearn that one, too! :-)

[QUOTE=Jay Levitt;41659]Is there some way - via escape, or another key - to say "take me out of editing mode and undo anything I've just typed"?[/QUOTE]

No, sorry, not yet: that's definitely the direction we're headed, but we haven't implemented that yet.

[QUOTE=Jay Levitt;41659] Escape, since the dawn of terminals, means, well, escape! [/QUOTE]

Exactly. And everyone knows that escape is what you hit to do auto completion/escape recognition in the command parser in TOPS-20 and its predecessor TENEX dating back to the early '70s, right? From there it found its way into various Unix shells. I forget, what was the point I was trying to make? :-)

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;42015]I forget, what was the point I was trying to make? :-)[/QUOTE]

I think your point was that I, of all people to claim that "ESC has always meant escape", should know better, since the first computer I ever worked on was a DECwriter terminal hooked up to LIRICS, a TOPS-20 network run by the Long Island public school systems.

I don't think I knew about command completion, though. I was too busy being fascinated by the way every keypress moved the printhead back to position, printed the character, and then moved the printhead out of the way so you could see it.