I’m very much accustomed to using CMD+ENTER to enter full-screen mode (going all the way back to MS-DOS prompt in Windows 3.0 days…) and find that keyboard combo much easier to type in the dark than cmd+option+f. To that end, I thought I’d make use of OS X’s Keyboard Shortcuts system, which allows you to change or assign keyboard shortcuts to pulldown menu options of any native Cocoa app (which Scrivener is).
So, I assigned CMD+ENTER to “Enter Full Screen Mode”. If I look at the “Window” pulldown menu, it does in fact show that “Enter Full Screen Mode” is now assigned to CMD+ENTER and not CMD+OPTION+F. However, there are times that CMD+ENTER fails to work, and when that happens, CMD+OPTION+F works just fine.
When I encounter this situation, all I have to do is click the “Window” pulldown menu once and then suddenly CMD+ENTER works for the rest of that Scrivener session. It seems as if the first display of that pulldown menu causes something internal to realize that, hey, the keyboard shortcut has been changed.
The peculiar thing here is that I use this feature a lot in other Cocoa programs and I’ve never seen this particular failure mode before.
If you have any suggestions, tips or further information on this relatively minor bug, I’d really love to hear about it. Thanks!
This isn’t a bug in Scrivener, as keyboard shortcuts are all handled at the system level; no Scrivener code is involved.
In your case, my guess is that you haven’t changed the keyboard shortcut for “Play/Stop Media File” (in the View > QuickTime menu), which is already assigned the cmd-return shortcut. Given that this comman appears before the enter full screen command (as it is in the View menu, which comes before the Windoow menu), that shortcut will take precedence - when you hit a keyboard shortcut, OS X searches through the menus until it finds one that matches. So it will find the shortcut for play media file, realise that you can’t, and do nothing. After opening the Window menu, it may remember the shortcut there having displayed the menu, though I’m not sure on that score.
Either way, changing the shortcut for “Play Media File” (you will need to set the same shortcut for “Play Media File” and “Stop Media File” because the title changes depending on whether a movie file is playing or not) should fix things.
Thanks for the help! What you said makes total sense, but strangely it didn’t work. I changed the shortcuts for the two menus you mentioned, and verified that the changes show up in the menu, but the behavior remains the same. It’s probably a bug in how OS X deals with this uncommon situation of overlapping shortcuts.