Remap ⌥← and ⌥→ (Option + Left / Right) to jump back/ahead one word
Make ⌥← and ⌥→ default for jumping one word back and forth or respectively mark text when pressing "shift" as used to in Premiere Pro and by default on Mac. Same issue exists in Photoshop where these shortcuts are annoyingly used to adjust kerning.
Source: https://forums.adobe.com/message/9919288
System: Mac OS X 10.11.6, Adobe Illustrator 22.1, Adobe Photoshop 19.1
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Michael
commented
In all other apps on a Mac, the option + L/R arrow keys will move the cursor to the next word. In illustrator, it this key combination changes the kerning/tracking of the text. This is frustrating and can not be changed in the keyboard shortcuts settings.
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Kris Hunt
commented
Why? His reasoning is “Illustrator has always done it this way”. That does not address any of my reasons for it being a bad implementation.
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Steve Laskevitch
commented
No. I agree with the comment by Rene Andritsch.
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Kris, to reiterate once more, Shift + Command + [ / ] do not control kerning, these control tracking instead. It’s a different thing, with different hotkeys.
I agree with René, an option to change it to match OS settings would be nice to have, to allow more users to tweak Ai and make it work as they expect, but I’m against changing the defaults. It should be a weighted and a non-forced decision, since it’s a shared and muscle-memorized behavior.
Don’t ever mess with defaults, it never ends good. I still suffer from having the Y-axis go down. I am learned to not hold Alt in Pathfinder though. -
Kris Hunt
commented
For me, I want to jump across words hundreds of times a day. I want to kern letter pairs maybe once a week. And to reiterate, Illustrator already uses Shift-Command-[ and Shift-Command-] for kerning, plus it's in the Character palette.
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Rene Andritsch
commented
CMD + arrow keys move the cursor across words. I think it has done so for the past 25 years. That is how long I work with those apps. ALT + arrow keys always kerned. InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and even After Effects.
An option in the Preferences would be a welcome thing so users can change it at their convenience but I would not change the default behavior. But that is a personal opinion.
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That’s an interesting topic.
In Illustrator on Windows, Alt + arrows kern, and it feels right. Alt + arrows in other apps don't do anything in general, unless an app has a special treatment for these. Shift + Ctrl + [ / ] does not KERN, but changes the TRACKING, which is a different thing.
Ctrl + arrows though always do what Opt-arrows do on Mac.In all apps I tested on Windows, Ctrl + Right moves the cursor right after the word if it has a punctuation sign right after it, or at the beginning of the next word — just like you described, and it does not feel wrong, because it’s a shared unified behavior across all apps.
But I agree it does not feel consistent with Macs’ apps.
So yep, perhaps Ai should allow a) to customize these manually, b) to auto-customize these to match the OS.(Edited by admin) -
Kris Hunt
commented
Everywhere else on a Mac, Option-arrow moves the cursor right or left across entire words. On Illustrator, it kerns letter pairs. Illustrator already uses Shift-Command-[ and Shift-Command-] for kerning, so it is stupid to override the standard Mac behavior with duplicate functionality that is not only rarely used, but also exists in the Character palette.
I know that, inexplicably, Illustrator supports Command-arrow for skipping across words, but it does it incorrectly. Not only does this method skip across the word, it also skips across the following space instead of the preceding space. The exception to this is if a word has a punctuation mark after it. In that case, Illustrator treats the punctuation mark as a word, and skips over the punctuation mark and the space that follows it, which is just ridiculous.
Here is a video of Illustrator's poor implementation of word skipping, using the wrong keyboard shortcut:
