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Glen Herriot3-Newcomer
3-Newcomer
May 1, 2026
Question

Please reduce mouse grabs

  • May 1, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 45 views

Hello, I  have been a paid user continuously since Version 1 back in the 80’s. In some important ways, Prime is still clunkier than earlier versions. I find I have to leave the keyboard, grab the mouse do some clicking on the document and then resume typing  to add every new region.

I generally like to create my documents in two columns: equations in one, and text describing them right beside, but nicely aligned. In the old days you could type an equation, press a key (possibly it was Tab) and it would skip right and you could start typing text. Another key (return??) would take you to beginning of a new line and you could continue.  

These days Tab only moves you to the next existing equation or document top, except it doesn’t even do that  if you are in a text region.

How can you exit a text region and get over to the beginning of the next row without grabbing the mouse.  That is a lot of down and left arrows to press?

What I would like is

  1. an easy keystroke to leave an region and go to the right where I could start typing. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be vertically aligned if you restore the older function to Align Regions Vertically. That is just one occasional mouse grab
  2. an easy keystroke to leave a region (especially a text region) and go down to the left edge one line below. It is particularly annoying to do that from a text region, or from any region that is not already at the left margin. 

1 reply

amcgough
amcgough14-Alexandrite
14-Alexandrite
May 5, 2026

Hey Glen,

Thanks for being a paid user for all that time! I really appreciate feedback from power users like you and the other participants in this session. 

The workflow you describe is absolutely a valid one - to be able to press a keyboard shortcut of some kind to exit a region and move to the right so you can type another region, and another keyboard shortcut to carriage return/line feed to the start of the next line. 

It is a desire of ours to provide as many tools as possible for users to create worksheets with just the keyboard. However, as you note, tab is used for something else now, and we already have over 120 keyboard shortcuts, and when you factor in 10 different language keyboards where some keys move or don’t exist, it becomes difficult to add new ones (having a customizable keyboard shortcut option would help with this (something on our list for a while)).

However, this is a good usability idea, and I’ll take it to the Mathcad technical product manager to see if we can come up with a way to provide it. I can’t promise a release, but we will look into the workflow.

Many thanks,

Andy.

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