- [Instructor] In this movie we'll discuss
the various dekeKeys shortcuts
that I've created for tools, transparency, and panels.
We're going to start off here on page nine,
and I happen to be looking at the dekeKeys
for a Mac document.
And if you were with me back in chapter 11
of the fundamentals course,
you may recall that we swapped a couple
of keyboard shortcuts associated with tools.
For example, we swapped the Blob Brush
with the Paintbrush tool,
so the Blob is B, which makes it easier to get to,
and the Paintbrush is shift + B.
We also swapped the Free Transform tool
so that it's shift + D and the Eraser tool
is just plain, old E.
We gave L to the Shape Builder tool,
and then we gave shift + M to the Ellipse tool.
You can also see that I've added shift + A
for the Arc tool, shift + G for the Polygon tool,
and so forth.
And I've also gone ahead and stolen
a couple of additional keyboard shortcuts.
Shift + P, which I reassigned to the Curvature tool,
after all, P gets you the Pen tool,
and the Curvature tool is a very close cousin.
And then shift + V, which I've assigned
to the Vertical Type tool, just in case you use that.
My main reason in doing this, however,
was to get them away from a couple of other tools.
And those tools, for what it's worth,
I'll just go ahead and switch to this document,
the Defaults document right here,
are these guys, the Perspective Grid tool
and the Perspective Selection tool.
Now, they can really be irritants
if you don't know how they work
and you accidentally select them.
Let me show you what I mean.
I'll go ahead and switch over to the last art board
in this Installation document here.
And I'll press ctrl + shift + alt + K,
or command + shift + option + K on a Mac
to bring up the Keyboard Shortcuts dialogue box.
And I'll switch back to the Illustrator defaults,
and I'll click OK.
And now I'll press shift + P.
So, imagine you don't mean to press shift + P,
you just do it because you're trying
to get to something else.
And you end up selecting this guy right here,
which is the Perspective Grid tool.
And in a worst-case scenario,
you're going to see this big perspective grid
all over the place.
And you're also going to see this little widget
in the top left corner.
Now, notice if I carefully move my cursor
over that tiny little X in the top left corner
of that widget, I can click to hide this grid.
However, I can only do so with one of these two tools.
Notice we've got the Perspective Grid tool
and the Perspective Selection tool,
which by default is set to shift + V.
If I were to switch back to, let's say, the Black Arrow tool
and try to click on that little X, it doesn't work.
And so, you just end up with this grid onscreen,
and you end up, if you're like most people
who I've seen encounter this problem,
just closing the artwork and reopening it,
because it looks pretty darn hopeless at this point.
Well, the real solution is to go up to the View menu,
choose Perspective Grid,
and then choose this command right there, Hide Grid,
which does have a keyboard shortcut of ctrl + shift + I,
command + shift + I on a Mac.
That is the default shortcut, by the way.
I don't think it's a discoverable shortcut,
but it is there.
And in any event, if I press that shortcut,
or choose the command, then the grid goes away.
The other shortcut that's a lot like that one, by the way,
so remember, that was ctrl + shift + I,
or command + shift + I,
if you press ctrl + alt + I,
or command + option + I on a Mac,
you end up getting a different visual effect,
which can be somewhat alarming.
This, by the way, is tied to a command
under the Type menu,
this guy right there, Show Hidden Characters.
Easier to get to, and in my opinion,
makes a little more sense.
In any event, I'll choose the command to turn it off.
And I'm going to press ctrl + shift + alt + K,
or command + shift + option + K on a Mac
to bring up the Keyboard Shortcuts dialogue box
and switch that back to dekeKeys customize and click OK,
so I don't accidentally encounter the problem
with the Perspective Grid tool.
Alright, let's go back to our PDF documents here.
And I'll switch to the next page.
This is pure custom shortcuts, by the way.
And what I've done is I've assigned shortcuts
to each one of the Opacity increments
in increments of 10%,
and I'm just lifting this from Photoshop.
So, this is exactly the way it works in Photoshop,
and with dekeKeys it works this way in Illustrator as well.
So, you tap the 1 key to set a selected object
to an opacity value of 10%,
all the way up to the 0 key for 100%.
And I've also assigned shift-number combinations
to a few of the best blend modes.
In Photoshop, it's shift + alt and a letter,
or shift + option and a letter on the Mac.
That's just not possible in Illustrator.
So, I gave shift + 1 and 2
to the best blend modes there are, Multiply and Screen.
We're going to see how they work
in the very next chapter of this course.
Shift + 3 is Overlay.
We go through the contrast modes,
that is to say Overlay, Soft Light, and Hard Light.
Then we get to the Color and Luminosity modes,
which begin with Hue, then Color, then Luminosity.
The Difference mode could be helpful every once in a while,
so I set it to shift + 9.
And then shift + 0 will reinstate the Normal blend mode,
which ultimately restores the opacity of the object.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and switch
to the next page right here.
And you can see that the tilde key by itself
sets the opacity value to 0%,
so you may recall 0 gave us 100%,
so we still needed zero.
Then I also assigned a couple of other
Photoshop keyboard shortcuts, shift + minus
for the previous blend mode,
and shift + plus for the next blend mode.
Alright, now let's scroll down to page 13 right here.
So, we can start seeing the function keys.
Now, the function keys are already set
to hide and show panels inside Illustrator,
but the method is pretty odd.
I'll go ahead and switch over to the defaults here,
and I'll scroll down the list to page 13.
Notice that F2 and 3 invoke the Cut and Copy commands,
which is super old school.
That's like a DOS thing, I don't like it.
It's not the kind of thing
that we need to waste function keys on.
And then shift + F3 kind of out of the blue
gets us the Color Guide panel.
Then we're at F4 for Paste.
We've got nothing going on beyond Paste for F4.
Then we have F5, shift + F5, F6, shift + F6,
going all the way down to F8, shift + F8.
Then we suddenly introduce command + F8,
command + shift + F8,
and then we're at these command and command + shift combos
for Fs nine, 10, and 11.
And so whatever you think of bringing up
and hiding panels using the function keys,
it is something you have to get used to.
I don't think these default settings work at all,
which is why I've modified things pretty heavily.
I've set F4 to the Navigator panel
and shift + F4 to the Libraries panel.
On all the other function keys
I also do an option or an alt on PC.
I don't do that for F4,
and that's because it's flat out dangerous on a PC.
You can see that alt + F4 is going to force quit
the active application without even asking you
any permission to do so.
Ctrl + F4 closes the active window,
and will do so without saving changes.
So, those are two shortcuts you want to avoid
unless you really know what you're doing.
Which is why I just don't assign
alt + F4 on a PC, you can't, or option + F4 on a Mac.
But otherwise we've got consistency.
F5, shift + F5, option + F5,
all the way up to the F11 keys.
Now, I tried to keep as many default shortcuts as I could,
but otherwise I shifted things around
and I added a bunch of shortcuts as well.
And it's the kind of thing,
either you're going to take to or not.
Feel free, of course, to assign function keys
to anything that you like.
And then finally, we've got this last page.
This is pure miscellany, I didn't change a single shortcut.
These are all default shortcuts.
We've got some asterisks to tell you about
how you can adjust the keyboard increment
in the General Preferences dialogue box.
That's up to you.
The only thing I want to call your attention to
is that on a Mac, pressing command + option + tab
will switch you between the Black and White Arrow tools.
And that will work on the fly
when you have the command key down
to get an Arrow tool on the fly.
On the PC, that's a very different shortcut,
so these are defaults, by the way.
And so notice if I switch over
to the PC document right here,
it's ctrl + tilde that switches you between
the Black and White Arrow tools.
And again, that's going to work for you on the fly as well.
And so, just to demonstrate it in case you forgot,
we've talked about this before,
but I'll go ahead and switch,
let's say to the Rectangle tool.
And I'll draw a rectangle,
and now let's say I want to move it.
Well, I could press and hold the ctrl key
or the command key on a Mac
to get my last used Arrow tool on the fly.
It happens to be the Black Arrow.
What if I want to move one of the corner points?
Then I could press here on the PC, ctrl + tilde
to switch to the White Arrow tool there on the fly.
That would be command + option + tab on a Mac,
and then I could just select an anchor point
and move it like so into a totally different position.
And then if I wanted to return to the Rectangle tool
I would just release the ctrl key here on the PC
or the command key on the Mac.
And that's what's going on with the shortcuts
for the tools, transparency, and panels,
many of which I enhanced quite dramatically using dekeKeys.