339 Change default keyboard shortcuts

- [Instructor] In the latest version of Adobe InDesign CC 2018, which is .1 as I record this, released in March 2018, there's a new feature for people who don't like the default InDesign keyboard shortcuts. If you go to the edit menu and go down to keyboard shortcuts, you'll see an option to use either Photoshop shortcuts or Illustrator shortcuts, which I thought was very interesting, and why would anybody want to do that? You know, when I was thinking about it, I'm going to cancel out of here, and I went to Photoshop, the keyboard shortcuts are the same.

Under the file menu if you want to create a new document, it's Cmd + N, if you want to print, it's Cmd + P, the equivalent to the selection tool, the move tool is a V, there's a lot of keyboard shortcuts in common, and the same thing for Illustrator is what I was thinking. It took me a long time of hunting through these to see was there a keyboard shortcut that was different from the one in InDesign, but there must be, otherwise they wouldn't have allowed those options right? Then on Facebook, I found this conversation in the InDesign Secrets discussion group where somebody posted that he's really struggling learning the keyboard shortcuts.

"The keyboard gymnastics you have to perform for some "of the simplest things." And he's like how come they can't be like other applications? And I said what other applications? And he said "I thought I'd just be able to carry over "a lot of what I know from Photoshop and Illustrator." (laughs) So it was like he was a plant from the InDesign engineering team, here's somebody who really wants to do that. I've decided to take a closer look, and I'm going to show you how there actually are a number of different keyboard shortcuts if you're coming from Photoshop and Illustrator that you might actually want to try that.

And actually this is two tips in one, so not only am I going to show you the differences in the keyboard shortcuts, but also how I created that. So it's kind of an Acrobat tip. What I did was I compared all the keyboard shortcuts using Acrobat Pro's compare feature, and to do that, it only works with PDFs, so the first thing I did was I created a text file of all the keyboard shortcuts for the default set, and then also for the Photoshop set, and the Illustrator set.

So if you go to show set, it creates a text file, and then from the text file, I printed it with Cmd or Ctrl + P, and I saved it as a PDF, or if I was on Windows, I would just print to the PDF printer. Then I opened the default and the Photoshop in Acrobat and ran the compare, and did the same thing for the default set and Illustrator. And let's jump over to Acrobat, and I'll go ahead and open up the reports that I saved of the two compares, so here's Illustrator, and there's Photoshop, two different reports.

So if you ever want to do the same thing, and compare a couple PDFs, it only compares two at a time, open them both up, and then go to Acrobat Pro, and then go to the view menu and choose compare files. You can't compare two compare results, then you can save the results, which is what I've done. So here are the differences between the changes between the default shortcuts from InDesign and Photoshop. It counts 26 changes, and we can come here and choose next change. Well of course the name of the set is different right? Here's the default, here's the Photoshop, the old was default, the new one, but let's go on.

For revert in InDesign, there was no keyboard shortcut, but there is one in Photoshop, and I was like, what, there's a keyboard shortcut for revert? And I had to go see for myself, and there it is, F12, on the Mac at least. I'm not going to go through all these, but I thought it was interesting that, especially when there is one for InDesign, such as Cmd + Y, or Ctrl + Y on Windows, to edit a story in the story editor, now I use that all the time, but they took that away.

If you switched to using Photoshop shortcuts in InDesign, Cmd or Ctrl + Y won't work. And let's see if we can find it really quickly, there's a whole bunch of these, but the answer is that Cmd or Ctrl + Y is going to be for, and let's go ahead and switch it now, if I switch to Photoshop shortcuts, under the view menu, proof colors. If you're coming from Photoshop, you might actually use that keyboard shortcut quite a bit, and so that's why they moved it over there, and now in edit in story editor has no keyboard shortcut.

If you are just going to be using InDesign for like three times a year and you're a big fan of Illustrator and Photoshop, I suppose it makes sense to go ahead and switch to that. On the other hand, if you are just trying to add InDesign to your tool set, it's a much better idea to just learn the keyboard shortcuts yourself, I always recommend that. You may have noticed that there's other keyboard shortcuts sets that you could switch to, including QuarkXPress and PageMaker, which I never recommended anybody who's moving from those layout programs either.

It's a little aggravating to me as an InDesign user that we don't have these same options in Photoshop or Illustrator to use the InDesign shortcuts instead, but I'll try and live with it, but please remember everybody, if you are coming from Photoshop, or Illustrator, or any program, and there is a command that you really want to assign a keyboard shortcut to, it is so simple to just create your own keyboard shortcut. So if you're using the default InDesign set, and you'd need a keyboard shortcut for proofing, then just switch to the view menu here, and then find proof color, so I'm going down to the Ps, and then you can assign a keyboard shortcut.

Now as in any of the programs, in all the programs that allow you to edit the keyboard shortcuts, you're not going to be able to edit the default set, so as soon as you try to create a keyboard shortcut here, say that I want to do Ctrl + P and click assign, I'm going to get yelled at and say, should I create a new set? Yes please, create a new set, and I'll call this one AMC, click OK, and then you can go ahead and add it. And now when I go to look at something and I want to proof the colors, I can just press Ctrl + P. So that's the way to do it correctly, in my opinion.

But there are a few cases, like that gentleman who just needs to visit InDesign once in a while and he's a pro at Photoshop and Illustrator, when actually switching the keyboard shortcuts to those of Photoshop or Illustrator makes a lot of sense.