4 years and 6 months later, I have the solution haha… can’t believe I just worked around it all this time.
Indesign keeps your keyboard shortcuts (in windows) here:
C:\Users\Yourname\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\Version #n_US\InDesign Shortcut Sets\
My heavily customized set of keyboard shortcuts was here, but it had some problem that forced me to click OK to dialogue boxes instead of pressing enter. I couldn’t spot this problem by clicking the “show shortcuts” button within indesign, because that just generates a plain text file of the shortcuts, and strips out a bunch of hidden stuff.
To see the hidden stuff, I made a copy of my custom_shortcuts.indk, and renamed that copy to custom_shortcuts.txt. The file is readable, it’s in XML format, so a typical shortcut looks like:
<shortcut>
<action-id value=”0x1d000 + 4″ name=”kZoomFitPageInWindowActionID”></action-id>
<context>DefaultContext</context>
<string>Ctrl+0</string>
</shortcut>
The first issue is that somehow my file had weird wrapping or tabs or something, so instead of being all tidy like the above example, it was more like… <shortcut> <action-id value=”0x1d000 + 4″ name=”kZoomFitPageInWindowActionID”></action-id> <context>DefaultContext</context> <string>Ctrl+0</string> </shortcut>
making it a real pain to read. So I copied it into Indesign, thinking to do some GREP search-and-replace to insert line breaks and tabs as needed. But magically, when I pasted it into indesign, it fell into tidy columns with tabs all by itself. I then copied it back into the file I’d been editing (“custom_shortcuts.txt”) and now it at least was legible.
I then ran a search for the word “Enter” in my file, and also in the default indesign shortcut file (which I was able to view the same way, by making a copy of it, and then renaming it to default_copy.txt).
I figured out that the Indesign default file had a crucial difference. The default file had –
<shortcut>
<action-id value=”0x600 + 2″ name=”kDefaultButtonActionID”></action-id>
<context>DialogContext</context>
<string>#Keyboard_Enter_Win</string>
</shortcut>
In my custom file, the name was slightly different, but more importantly, that “#Keyboard_Enter_Win” was missing.
<shortcut>
<action-id value=”0x600 + 2″ name=”KBSCE Alerts:Default button”></action-id>
<context>DialogContext</context>
<string></string>
</shortcut>
So I simply pasted #Keyboard_Enter_Win between those two <string> tags, and poof… I could press enter to OK dialogue boxes and confirm things.
Dunno if anyone else ever had this issue but maybe the info will help others troubleshoot keyboard shortcuts without rebuilding them from scratch.
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