Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts

Inkscape allows you to use your own custom keyboard shortcuts. There are various reasons why you would want to change those:

  • you have used a different graphics software before, and would like to keep the shortcuts the same, so you don’t need to learn so many new ones

  • your keyboard layout makes it very hard to press some key combinations

  • certain key combinations are already in use on your computer, and you do not want to change them just for Inkscape

  • you want to assign a shortcut to a functionality in Inkscape that doesn’t have a shortcut by default

You can change the shortcuts at Edit ‣ Preferences ‣ Interface ‣ Keyboard.

The dialog lets you choose between some prefilled keyboard shortcut maps that resemble those of other graphics programs.

Choosing a key map

You can choose between a couple of presets for the keyboard shortcuts.

In addition to this, you can overwrite any shortcut by:

  1. selecting it from the list;

  2. clicking on the field in the Shortcut column;

  3. pressing the new shortcut, when it says New accelerator in that field. Pressing Backspace will reset the shortcut to its default value.

Setting a new keyboard shortcut

When it says ‘New accelerator’, press the new shortcut.