So this week I’m here at The Creative Suite Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and Anne-Marie and I were on stage yesterday doing an “essential InDesign tips & tricks” session. For technical reasons, we were both demoing on her laptop, and I kept leaning over to type something, or move the mouse here and there, and so on. I get it into my head to teach one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts: Activate Last-used Field in Panel… and the shortcut doesn’t work! A disaster in front of a crowd of people.
Fortunately, I’ve had this problem before on other people’s computers and I know just how to fix it.
Before I explain the solution, let me give you the background on the shortcut. On the American/English keyboard, The Activate Last-used Field shortcut is Command-Option-tilde (~) or grave accent (`)… it’s the one up near the “1” key. On Windows it’s the same thing, but with Ctrl-Alt. I don’t know what the shortcut is on non-English keyboards (feel free to chime in in the comments below).
The shortcut is great because it takes you back to the last-used palette field. For example, you can edit the Space Before field for a paragraph, then jump to another paragraph, press the shortcut, and it’ll put the focus right back in the Space Before field again. Very helpful when you’re moving quickly!
But sometimes the shortcut stops working on a Mac. Why? Because Command-Option-` is reserved by the Mac OS. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix. Here’s what you do (and what I did on stage): I opened System Preferences from the Apple menu, clicked on Keyboard & Mouse, navigated to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and turned off the checkbox next to “Move focus to the window drawer.”
After all, who ever uses the “move focus to the window drawer” feature? Who even knows what it does? Not me! So I turned it off, closed System Preferences, and the shortcut worked in InDesign! Demo saved!
Anne-Marie looks at me and says, “Oh, I wondered why that shortcut never worked for me.” I knew then that I had to write this blog post. ;)
A quick glance through the Keyboard & Mouse system prefs pane shows that the Mac reserves a lot of shortcuts for itself, and sometimes they’re ones that you expect to work in InDesign. If you find an InDesign shortcut doesn’t work for you, and you’re on a Mac, that’s one of the first places you should head. It’s not obvious, but it’s important to know.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on May 22, 2008
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Interesting fact about using this shortcut:
Suppose you set the Number of Columns to 3 in Control Panel and confirm it pressing Return key.
Then you go to the control field again by selecting its field with your mouse. Say it’s Font Size. You change it and don’t press Return this time, but simply click on some other text. That means you’ve applied the new font size anyway.
What if you press our magic Ctrl+Alt+~?
Aha! You get the Number of Columns field again!
These little subtleties…
David and Anne-Marie mentioned this shortcut at the conference in Toronto too… and it didn’t work for me either until I changed my System Preferences. While you’re there turn off [or change] the system shortcuts that use F9-F12, so you can access all of your panels.
In the Brazilian keyboard there would be no such problem, since the ~ sits right to the right of the Ç (and you don’t even need the Shift to get to it). The next key to the left of the 1 is ‘/”.
Oh my, A-M, that is priceless. I have to admit that when I read this post I thought “what the heck good is that?” Of course later in the day, I was performing the contortion and getting into a pretty good rhythm. One word of caution: immediately above the ~ key is the escape key…you don’t want the combination that uses the escape key…at least not for this.
In the Brazilian keyboard (the one with a Ç just to the right of the L), it’s Ctrl+Alt+´, but the ´ key is located just above and to the right of the Ç.
Th~nks, D~vid, th~t w~s ~ gre~t tip! I use it ~ll the time now. ~nd I don’t notice ~nything different with my M~c, either.
Jennie, I didn’t see a reference to it there but it is on the wiki site labeled as Dead Key. For some reason, if I post a link in my comment my comment does not get entered, so I can’t direct you with a link.
It’s in Wiki under Keyboard Layout, at 1.1
Eugene, I found a reference to deadmans key here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch
It is toward the end of the article.
Yeh seems like a good one and an obscure, who’d have thought they program that little dousy in there. I realise I can change the keyboard shortcut too, it’s weird because, at least for me, the CTRL ALT ~ does nothing on my Windows machine, so that shall be my shortcut from now on.
It’s a good idea to pop thorough the keyboard shortcuts, I see many a thing in there that I didn’t know InDesign could do.
For instance, one of my first findings was the Keep Rows Together, for tables, which I saw in the Keyboard Shortcut dialog box.
This particular shortcut mentioned in the blog is another great find.
Well, after a few hours of sleep it occurs to me that I ought at least to have mentioned one more alternative to using this feature: Just change the KBSC to something else in InDesign! It’s not hard to do: You can find it in the Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, under the “Views, Navigation” Product Area.
Roland and Eugene, that would help the “awkward position” problem.
The shortcut is really great, once you try it a few times.
Thanks an awkward to press. And a slip of the fingers causes me the switch the next document.
Does anyone else call the Grave Accent key (beside 1) the Deadmans Key? Heard it recently and thought it was a nice name for it.
I’ve never knew about that shortcut but it seems quite useful. It’s an awkward hand position to press Ctrl + Alt + ~ but since I’ve managed to get used to Ctrl + Alt + Shift + V [Past in place] I’m sure I’ll manage to get used to this one too and start using it.
Thanks :)