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Managing Keyboard Shortcuts

The $HOME/.katana/shortcuts.xml configuration file can be used to override the default keyboard shortcuts of actions and key events that are registered with Katana’s new Keyboard Shortcut Manager.

Example of a shortcuts.xml File

Below is an example of a shortcuts.xml file:

<shortcuts>
  <shortcut id="430f81d33d338680a0c64ae9ea311cd7"
            name="SceneGraphView.ExpandBranchesToAssembly"
            shortcut="A"></shortcut>
</shortcuts>

The ID of a keyboard shortcut element is assigned by the developer that registers the action or key event. It is a hash based on the original name of the action or key event. While the name of an action or key event changes, the ID remains the same for future versions of Katana. This ensures that the correspondence of custom keyboard shortcuts to the respective actions or key events remain the same, even if names change in future Katana releases.

The name attribute of a shortcut XML element only appears for readability, making it easy to identify the action or key event to which the shortcut has been assigned. The names in the shortcuts.xml file are not updated automatically when names of actions or key events are changed in the application.

You can view the currently assigned keyboard shortcuts of actions and key events, for which custom keyboard shortcuts can be assigned, in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. You can copy an XML representation of an item in the keyboard shortcuts tree to the selection buffer clipboard by right-clicking the item and selecting Copy as XML from the context menu. Pasting such an XML representation into the shortcuts.xml file allows you to override the custom keyboard shortcut assigned for the respective action or key event.

In future releases of Katana, more and more of Katana’s menu commands and other actions and key events are adopted to using the new Keyboard Shortcut Manager, so that they can be customized as well.