Disable all Zotero keyboard shortcuts option

Yakumo

With a fairly long list of keyboard shortcuts conflicts are bound to happen, with Chris Pederick's WebDev Toolbar installed for example there are several conflicts by default, and I suspect the same would occur for many other plugins.

I have posted on the WebDev Toolbar forums asking for an option to disable all of the plugin's shortcut keys, but I would like to request the same option for Zotero in the interests of free user choice.

Thanks for all your amazing work on this great tool.

Yakumo.

dstillman

What conflicts are you seeing?

With the exception of the main Z shortcut, Zotero's shortcuts are implemented differently from most keyboard shortcuts in Firefox in an effort not to conflict with other extensions. Zotero shortcuts should only be triggered when the Zotero pane has focus. (This may not work as well in Firefox 2.)

For example, on OS X, with the Web Developer Toolbar installed, Cmd-Shift-A will trigger the toolbar's Validate Local HTML action unless Zotero has focus, in which case it will trigger Zotero's Copy Citation action.

The "Try to override conflicting shortcuts" option in the Shortcut Keys pane of the Zotero prefs is a holdover from earlier versions where this didn't work as well, and that option will likely be removed. With that setting disabled, Cmd-Shift-Z might then conflict (until this is fixed), but other shortcuts that conflict should behave as I describe above.

Also, on Windows, Zotero uses Ctrl-Alt shortcuts, whereas (and largely because) Web Developer uses Ctrl-Shift shortcuts, so I wouldn't think you would see conflicts.

Regardless, Zotero shortcuts can be cleared just by clearing the boxes in the Shortcut Keys pane. They can be reset to defaults by typing about:config in the address bar, searching for zotero.keys, right-clicking on particular shortcuts and clicking Reset. (Web Developer also lets you set its shortcut keys via about:config, though they're still implemented as global shortcuts.)