Like most designers, I spend my day going back and forth between InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. All three of these programs are similar and different in their own way. At times it can be frustrating when you use an InDesign shortcut in Photoshop or an Illustrator shortcut in InDesign and it doesn’t work as expected. That gave me the idea to come up with a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts that work the same in all three programs.
InDesign and Illustrator are by far the closest when it comes to sharing shortcuts, but Photoshop is the oddball that breaks alot of the shorcuts. Deselect all is a great example. In InDesign and Illustrator, it is Cmd(ctrl)+Shift+A, but in Photoshop it is Cmd(ctrl)+D. Since it wasn’t the same it didn’t make the cut.
Overall I noticed that the shortcuts for working with type and moving objects around on the page were consistent, but that was about it. The one shortcut that stuck with me was layers. F7 works in all three. I never realized that before since in Photoshop Layers is always open for me, but sure enough it works.
After spending some time and testing to see what shortcuts translate between InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator I uploaded a PDF with a listing of the Mac and PC shortcuts. If i missed any please let me know and I will update the PDF accordingly.
This article was last modified on December 1, 2023
This article was first published on May 13, 2009
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