- Now obviously, you're going to be using the Blob Brush
and the Eraser Tool in concert with each other,
possibly along with the Shape Builder Tool as well,
so you may wonder why I haven't mentioned
the keyboard shortcuts for any of these tools,
and that's because I don't like them.
For example, If I click and hold on the Blob Brush,
you can see that it gets Shift B,
while the Paintbrush Tool, which you are going
to use far less often, gets the keyboard shortcut of B.
Meanwhile, the Eraser Tool, by default is set
to Shift D, while E is assigned to another less
popular tool, which is the Free Transform Tool,
and then finally, the Shape Builder has a keyboard shortcut
of Shift M, which doesn't really make any sense,
so in this movie, I'm going to show you how
to swap these keyboard shortcuts,
so that for example B is assigned to the Blob Brush,
and E is assigned to the Eraser Tool and so forth.
And the great thing about this is it doesn't harm anything,
you can always change your mind back
to the default settings anytime you like.
So, the first step is to go up to the Edit Menu
and choose the Keyboard Shortcuts Command,
and then you want to make sure
that you are looking at your tools.
If you are looking at Menu Commands,
you can just switch to Tools like so,
and then you're going to have to scroll
pretty far down the list, about midway down,
to find the Shape Builder right there,
and then you want to click on its shortcut of Shift M,
and here on the PC, you have to click twice on the shortcut
to totally make it active, and then, I'm going
to change this shortcut to L, which makes more sense to me,
because the letter L actually appears in the word builder,
and then I'm going to get a warning down here,
which tells me that the shortcut
was already in use by the Ellipse Tool,
and so to swap things around, click on Go to Conflict
in order to switch to the Ellipse Tool,
which is a neighbor of the Rectangle Tool,
and because Rectangle Tool has a keyboard shortcut of M
for Marquee, that hails from Photoshop,
then why don't we just change the Ellipse Tool
to Shift M, since it's arguably the second
most popular of the Shape Tools.
Alright, now notice, just a little ways down here
that we have the Paintbrush and the Blob Brush.
I'm going to click on the keyboard shortcut
for the Blob Brush a couple of times
in order to make it active,
and then I'll just press the B key.
I'm once again told I have a conflict,
so I'll click on the Go to Conflict Button.
I'll click on its shortcut, and I'll press Shift B,
and that way the more popular brush
has the keyboard shortcut of B,
and the less popular one involves the Shift key.
Then I'll click on Shift D, which is assigned
to the Eraser right here, and I'll change it to E,
and then I'll click on Go to Conflict
and for Free Transform, I'll go ahead and click
on its keyboard shortcut and change it to Shift E.
Alright now you want to go ahead and save your shortcuts,
and you do that by clicking on the this little
Save icon right there, and I'm going to go ahead
and call my shortcuts DekeKeys
cause I've been calling them that for years,
and then I'll go ahead and click OK,
and now I'll click OK once again,
in order to accept my changes.
and now, as you can see here, the Blob Brush Tool
has a keyboard shortcut of B, while the
Paintbrush Tool is assigned Shift B.
Meanwhile, the Eraser Tool has the shortcut of E,
where the Free Transform Tool has a keyboard
shortcut of Shift E, and then finally directly below,
the Shape Builder Tool has a keyboard shortcut of L,
and if I click and hold on the Rectangle Tool,
the Ellipse Tool has a keyboard shortcut of Shift M.
Now, if at any time, you want to go back
to the way things were. then all you have to do
is go up to the Edit Menu, and once again,
choose the Keyboard Shortcuts Command,
and then change the set back to Illustrator Default,
and everything will be just the way it was
when you first launched the program.
I like my modifications, however, so I'm going
to leave things set to DekeKeys
just by canceling out of the this dialog box.
And that's how you customize your keyboard shortcuts,
so that B gets you the Blob Brush,
E gets you the Eraser Tool, and L gets you the Shape Builder
here inside Illustrator.