Change keyboard shortcuts in Prime?

[dsochor]

Is it possible to change the keyboard shortcuts in MathCAD Prime? I'd like to make the match MathCAD 14.

[RichardJ · Accepted solution]

Sorry, but that is not possible. Even if there were a way to do it I'm not sure it would be a good idea. If you changed one it would probably break another, so you would have to change that one too, which would probably break another, etc etc. Your shortcuts would then also not match anything in the help files.

[dsochor]

Thank you Richard for your reply.

[athurin]

Hi Daniel,

I suggested customisable key bindings on the "product ideas" section ( http://communities.ptc.com/ideas/4106 ). Don't hesitate to vote for it, and maybe with time, developpers will include it in a future release.

Regarding the help issue and "one shortcut breaks another", I don't think this is really relevant. Lots of video games have customisable keyboard shortcuts, and they manage it both in help and in application to avoid duplicates. It may required skilled developpers, but there are obviously solutions to these issues, as it was solved in other programs before.

[RichardJ]

Most games don't have quite as many shortcuts though. Mathcad has a very large number of shortcuts, so most (all?) possibilities are used. If you change a shortcut in Prime to be the same as Mathcad 15, chances are that would break another shortcut. If it's one you don't use maybe that doesn't matter, but maybe it means changing another shortcut. And so on.

[athurin]

I totally understand that, and I agree. But I still don't think that's an issue, for the following reasons :

• You only have to do it once (or little by little, as needed). It would be a totally different story if you had to set it up for each spreadsheet. And if it well designed, you can even share the config with colleagues, so that it is not to painful.
• How many shortcut do people use ? 10 ? 20 ? 30 tops ? There is a limited amount of information I can store in my brain, I won't use up the available memory with shortcuts I don't use. If you just swap shortcuts you use with ones you don't use, you're fine.
• I don't think anyone can argue that no shortcuts / stupid shortcuts (due to non-US keyboard, for instance) is better than some (maybe not easily) customizable shortcuts.

Example. I am an big fan a subscript. Massive fan. If I could, I would do sub-subscripts and maybe even sub-sub-subscripts. Shortcut is Ctrl+-. except I have a french keyboard, and Ctrl+- on the "main" part of the keyboard doesn't work, it only works with the numerical pad ... which I don't have on my laptop. So unless I plug in an external keyboard, I have to click to get subscripts, which I use severl times per operation ! That's just unacceptable. I would happily trade any silly function or symbol I never (or rarely) use for a good subscript shortcut.

[RichardJ]

Shortcut is Ctrl+-. except I have a french keyboard, and Ctrl+- on the "main" part of the keyboard doesn't work, it only works with the numerical pad

I wasn't aware of that. If you have Ctrl and you have -, why would Ctrl+- not work? Seems to me that's just a bug that PTC needs to fix.

Anyway, my answer was in the context of the original question, which was to make the Prime shortcuts match the MC15 shortcuts. Literal subscripts are a good example of why that's not necessarily so simple. In MC15 "." has a behavior that's context sensitive. In a variable it gives a literal subscript, but in a number it gives the decimal separator. So making literal subscripts in Prime work the same as in Mathcad 15 is not as simple as just assigning "." to be a shortcut. I'm not against having the possibility to define extra shortcuts, I'm just saying that making Prime like MC15 would not be so easy. One operator I would really like to have a shortcut for is the degree symbol. Prime doesn't offer one, and I have no idea why. "Ctrl Shft o" is available and would be logical.

[athurin]

I see your point. Considering the article Werner recommended, I understand the idea. And I have nothing against changing shortcuts for something more logical (as long as it is reasonably unfrequent. A major release, such as Prime, is a good time to do so). Not changing things because "that's the way we do / it's been like this forever" is the worst reason ever, and I fight people who think that way in my company on a regular basis (and complain about this attitude on an almost daily basis). But maybe I say that because I never used Mathcad-not-Prime .

Anyway, French keyboards have "-" and "^" keys, that don't even need an Alt/AltGr/Ctrl to access, but those shortcuts still don't work. Another thing that makes the software look a bit "amateurish", but even it that's not fixed as such, customieable key bindings would be a great way of solving the problem as well as providing an improvement.

(IMO, the interface issue are the ones that harm the software the most. I my mind, a symbolic math engine is something hard, and a bug there is unpleasant, but more understandable. On the other hand, everybody does graphical interfaces, so I [naively?] think it can't be that hard. And messing that up doesn't give confidence in the rest...)

Back to the "." issue, what you say makes perfect sense, and I think nobody using MS Office would think of putting a shortcut on ".", that's just dumb. There is no harm in restricting customizable shortcuts to Ctrl (or Alt, or AltGr, or Ctrl+Alt) + "something". And for people who miss the illogical shortcuts of M15 that do not fall under this category ... too bad.

[RichardJ]

. On the other hand, everybody does graphical interfaces, so I [naively?] think it can't be that hard. And messing that up doesn't give confidence in the rest...)

I agree. In fact, I thought Windows took care of the keyboard mapping, so hitting "Ctrl" + "-" should send the same keystroke to the software regardless of the keyboard layout.

[athurin]

I have looked a bit, Ctrl+- doesn't seem to be a Windows shortcut. I am not sure what to look for to understand what actually happens in windows when you press Ctrl. Nevertheless, if it is not a shortcut managed by Windows, it is managed by Mathcad, and obviously something goes wrong on this end.

This is all messed up with non-US keyboards. On a French keyboard, the "^" doesn't do a ^, it waits for you to type another characted, then adds it on top (ex: ^+a = â. ^+Space=^). So when I type it in Mathcad, I get a program, not an exponentiation. Same problem (probably for the same reason) with "¨"

And that's just the French mapping. I assume other keyboards have other issues. I can't imagin what hell people with non-roman alphabets go through, and if I was them and wanted to work in my native language, I would stay away from Mathcad and try competitors.

[Werner_E]

On a French keyboard, the "^" doesn't do a ^, it waits for you to type another characted, then adds it on top (ex: ^+a = â. ^+Space=^). So when I type it in Mathcad, I get a program, not an exponentiation.

On a German keyboard "^" acts as a so called dead key, too. Unfortunately I don't get a program in Prime when I press it and until now I wasn't able to find any keyboard shortcut to do so. Don't understand why pressing Shiftl-Enter does not automatically create a program structure (like "]" does in Mathcad and, as I understand, does so with English keyboards in Prime, too).

Nevertheless I don't have problems with exponentiation (typing 2^3 works as it should) as long as I don't want soemthing like 2^e or x^a because here I would get 2*ê and xâ respective. Pressing "space" after "^" works in Prime but not in Mathcad (will change the region to a text region or expands the blue selection cursor).

As missing support for internatinal keyboards was already pointed out when Prime1 saw light I guess its also something of minor priority if at all. Is there anything else but Creo integration which has high priority in Prime development? Users who would like to use Prime as a stand alone program don't seem to be the primary target audience I guess.

[athurin]

Funny you should ask, I was just looking about this

Here is what I found : http://blogs.ptc.com/2014/09/15/ptc-mathcad-prime-past-present-future/

Seems to me that actually useful features will start appearing in Prime 4.0. Maybe in another 2 years time ? And what they mention for Prime 5.0 (although I understand it is the early stages) is still not there in terms of international support. *sigh*

Timescale involved for features that seem pretty fundamental, and not the hardest, is depressing. I would be surprised if low quality plotting wasn't pointed out in Prime 1 in 2011, and we are looking at a fix in 2016-2017 at best. How crazy is that ?

At least, they don't seem to want to "reboot" it again in a horrible "ModernUI" style...

[RichardJ]

I would be surprised if low quality plotting wasn't pointed out in Prime 1 in 2011

Back in the first beta test in 2009 (there was subsequently an alpha test a year later, and then another beta test before the release of Prime 1.0) this was how I started my description of the graphs:

"The 2D graphs are pathetic!"

I had a bit more to say after that, but you get the general idea. Although it's hard to believe, they were actually a lot worse than the ones that were released in Prime 1.0!

Looking back at that first email that I sent after looking at the very first version of Prime I'm actually a little shocked at what I wrote. Wow! Talk about brutal! It's not the sort of thing I could post on a nice, family friendly forum such as this one

[dsochor]

Are there significantly more shortcuts in Prime than MathCad 15 and earlier?

I'm not trying to be a complainer, originally I started this discussion hoping to simplfy some of the shortcuts and make MathCad more efficient. Richard then smartly let me know that doing so could duplicate shortcuts. The MathCad developers are smart and I'm sure there is a good reason for why shortcuts were made more complicated that the typical end user is unaware of. Maybe there is planning future functionality that wasn't in the original version which required setting aside certain short cuts?

[Werner_E]

Daniel Sochor wrote:

Are there significantly more shortcuts in Prime than MathCad 15 and earlier?

I'm not trying to be a complainer, originally I started this discussion hoping to simplfy some of the shortcuts and make MathCad more efficient. Richard then smartly let me know that doing so could duplicate shortcuts. The MathCad developers are smart and I'm sure there is a good reason for why shortcuts were made more complicated that the typical end user is unaware of. Maybe there is planning future functionality that wasn't in the original version which required setting aside certain short cuts?

You might be interested in this blog where someone from PTC development tries to explain why keyborad shortcuts were changed in Prime compared to Mathcad: http://blogs.ptc.com/2014/05/21/the-finger-cut-to-save-the-hand-keyboard-shortcuts-in-mathcad-prime/

[RichardJ]

Some were changed to be more logical. For example, Prime has both column and row operators. So the shortcut for the column operator was changed from "Ctrl ^" to "Ctrl Shft C", and the row operator was assigned to "Ctrl Shft R". Then for consistency the transpose operator was assigned "Ctrl Shft T". A lot of the Prime shortcuts are quite logical (IMO, more so than in MC15 in fact), they are just not what we are used to.

The literal subscript operator was changed to "Ctrl -" because in Prime you can type a variable name such as my.variable, which is not possible in MC15.

[Fred_Kohlhepp]

Richard Jackson wrote:

The literal subscript operator was changed to "Ctrl -" because in Prime you can type a variable name such as my.variable, which is not possible in MC15.

Sure it is! Remember "cntrl-shift k" !!

[RichardJ]

As soon as you hit Ctrl Shft k again to exit that typing mode it becomes a literal subscript.

[Werner_E]

Daniel Sochor wrote:

Is it possible to change the keyboard shortcuts in MathCAD Prime? I'd like to make the match MathCAD 14.

PTC is not even able to provide meaningful keyboard shortcuts for foreign keyboards. Sometimes by chance you find an awkward key combination which would do what you want but ever so often for things constantly used (some programming features) there is no shortcut at all and you know what that means - grabbing the item from the ribbon menu which is so cumbersome and time consuming. Italian users have told here not to be able to insert a simple caret (^) using the appropriate key on their keyboard - thats crazy indeed.

So I definitely would prefer to be able to (re)define keyboard shortcuts. M$ Word sure has more shortcuts than Prime and we are able to redefine them without problems, get warned when we overwrite an existing one, etc. Implementing that feature should not be that difficult for a decent proamming team but I have my doubts if the ressources which PZT devotes to the development of Prime would allow to tackle that task. Given how Prime is flagged they may have different priorities.

[athurin]

Werner Exinger wrote:

Italian users have told here not to be able to insert a simple caret (^) using the appropriate key on their keyboard.

Same problem with a French keyboard. Technical support recommended to use AltGr+9 for exponentiation. Lucky for us, there is a second shortcut available, which is compatible with my keyboard. Lucky me...

Werner Exinger wrote:

So I definitely would prefer to be able to (re)define keyboard shortcuts. M$ Word sure has more shortcuts than Prime and we are able to redefine them without problems, get warned when we overwrite an existing one, etc. Implementing that feature should not be that difficult for a decent proamming team but I have my doubts if the ressources which PZT devotes to the development of Prime would allow to tackle that task. Given how Prime is flagged they may have different priorities.

I don't use shortcuts in MS Word, so I can't say, but a lot of video games do, and warn about duplicates, etc. And if they don't, I usually curse them for not telling me before I spent money on their crappy software.

If I was mean, I would say that assuming that the whole world uses US keyboards is increadibly pretentious, and almost reason enough not to buy the software (if they dont want me to be able to use it, why should I give them my money ?).

Anyway, Like Werner says, it is probably at the bottom of the priority list, considering the many and significantly more problematic issues with Mathcad Prime...

[Werner_E]

Werner Exinger wrote:

Implementing that feature should not be that difficult for a decent proamming team but I have my doubts if the ressources which PZT devotes to the development of Prime would allow to tackle that task. Given how Prime is flagged they may have different priorities.

Hmm, of course I was talking about a programming team and of PTC.