Keyboard Shortcut Autonomy - why you should be entitled to customise and disable them at will

[Broostah 1]

I note there are other complaints on this forum about not being able to disable individual keyboard shortcuts provided by the latest version of Evernote as default.  Some people have attempted to help by suggesting the user disable all "global shortcuts" as provided by Windows.  Others have drawn attention to the fact that you can individually customise each Evernote default shortcut even if you cannot disable them overall.  I'd like to offer one solution to users bugged by this problem and to raise a more "philosophical" issue (my apologies for using that term) which I think software developers should recognise.

The solution for frustrated users who, perhaps like me, are devotees of Evernote but severely disappointed in having shortcuts foisted on us with no regard to our existing setups, is simple if labour-intensive: locate the Settings option in your desktop Evernote app and individually re-configure those shortcuts you cannot use or don't want to use, selecting key combinations that are of no use to you.  I, for example, rely heavily on customised Alt+Ctrl shortcuts and there are many of these in the new Evernote iteration.  I simply reconfigured these in Evernote to a combination  I never use, such as (in my own example) Shift+Ctrl anything.

The question for developers, though, is more serious: there seems to be a collective lack of understanding or sympathy on the part of developers for users like me who rely heavily on a customised keyboard layout (to facilitate working in multiple languages more-or-less simultaneously, an important tool for my work).  When you customise your keyboard in Windows (using the old, deprecated Keyboard Layout Editor which thank goodness I still have an old copy of) you have to use a combination of "dead keys" and keyboard shortcuts.  That involves selecting a set of shortcuts that are not included in the global shortcuts that many of us long-term MS Office and Windows users come as second-nature: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X and so on.  Disabling global shortcuts is not an option!  We don't want to lose those few, but very helpful, shortcuts that are hard-wired now into our finger muscle memory.  The answer is quite simple again: programmers, developers, any changes like keyboard shortcuts should be entirely configurable for the user.  By all means introduce them but allow them to be disabled, one-by-one.  I may well want to keep some of the new Evernote shortcuts, but I do not want to have to redevelop my keyboard layout which I spent several months creating and which has, over the past 15 years, become something I am very proud of.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,962]

Hi, and welcome to the forums. No problem waxing philosophical for me! Part of the problem specific to Evernote is that only some shortcuts can be edited or disabled; others we're stuck with period. Worst of all, there's at least one default shortcut (Ctrl+Q) that has not 1 but 3 actions linked to it, depending on where you are in the program! That I consider incredibly poor programming. Fortunately, it is (partially) editable.

I don't use customized shortcuts globally, but I do have a program that uses a very extensive set of shortcuts while it's in focus, and I need to be careful that no other program's global shortcuts (e.g. Evernote's) conflict with these. Frankly, I think the set of users who rely heavily on large-scale KB customization is very small within the universe of computer users, even Evernote users, so I don't know whether they'll respond to this. But to make sure they see it (these forums are mainly user-to-user), email feedback@evernote.com. You can also submit a condensed, de-philosophized proposal to this effort to create a comprehensive wishlist:

 

[ferol 429]

I addes this simply to my table:

raw  A.17

 

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s36/sh/468827bb-c76d-c5bd-ddfb-43939eec55da/J32CLUxj4RO04QyhAwufC6ywh0VMCQGJnqU8GaPl7ObyybsJ-fmwAGQsyQ