Old, undocumented, KBSC “search feature” now intruding on the folders panel.

I’ve never owned an apple product so I don’t know how this might appear on a Mac. It would be interesting to hear from those customers to see if it runs through their installations as well.

I remember stumbling across this undocumented “feature”  by keystroke accident years ago.  I explored it and found it poorly conceived and therefore of little use.  It was easy to ignore since it was hard to discover and didn’t intrude on regular production workflows.  I forgot about it until earlier this year when it started to get in my way while attempting to exploit the new KBSC feature.

Here is how the undocumented feature used to behave before the introduction of the custom KBSC feature.  Try it in whatever version you’re using and confirm please.

• In the folders panel, Select a folder with known subfolders and files.
• Select View>Show Items from subfolders.
• Shift focus to a folder or file in the content panel.
• Press any non-assigned, single alpha-numeric key or combination of them, (e.g. a complete word).
• Watch closely at the bottom left of the content panel where Br activity is reported and observe what is being searched.  If your content panel is wide enough not to truncate the echoed information, there will appear a briefly displayed message “Selecting item containing “whatever key(s) you pressed”. Single presses of the key, (or typing a word if done quickly enough), will search the content window for that letter, number, or word and move to that file or folder. It’s a clumsy, relatively cryptic, and mostly useless search/KBSC/feature?!?  Searching for assets in Bridge is far better served by other documented search methods well known by Bridge professionals.  Perhaps that’s why this odd duck is undocumented?

But I digress…

In the past, this quirky bit of code was confined to the content panel.  As currently defined by Adobe, this would historically make it a “panel shortcut”, as opposed to an “application shortcut”.  I forgot about this half-baked feature years ago since it was undocumented. The (supposedly) unused alphanumeric keys have no color in the new KBSC set-up screen to indicate that it even exists.

With the introduction of the KBSC feature, it appears that this undocumented feature is now sometimes application-wide, (but not really), and has become a common annoyance for those seeking to create efficient, single key, application-wide shortcuts to Bridge features.

If a customer uses Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts  or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K  and then defines a single alpha-numeric key as a shortcut, (I use “s” for View>Show Items from Subfolders”. Try the same.), the KBSC set-up screen changes the “s” key color from grey, (unused), to purple. As defined by Adobe, this should make it an application-wide shortcut regardless of panel focus. That doesn’t happen because the old undocumented feature was never removed from the code and is still active in the background.

Today, if focus is on a selection in the folder panel and you press the “s” key, Br moves up and down the folder hierarchy cycling through folders in the folder panel that start with the letter “s” instead of flattening the selected folder’s hierarchy as expected. That is new and unexpected behavior.  If focus is then shifted to the content panel the “s” key now executes the proper command and flattens the folder hierarchy.

If focus is on an asset in your content panel, and you accidentally press some other single, unassigned letter, number, or combination of both, the old undocumented feature takes over again and either moves to a file or folder containing that letter or combination of letters, or goes nowhere at all without an explanation if the key(s) pressed yield no match.

This is sloppy coding. It confuses the customer since it is not consistently predictable behavior and should have been recognized and addressed while the engineers were still designing the new KBSC feature. How could the design team not have been aware of this?

To add insult to injury, if the Favorites panel is in focus and one selects a folder in that panel, the customized “s” key acts as a customer has assigned it and flattens the folder hierarchy in the content panel, even if there is another folder in favorites panel that starts with “s”. So, which is it?  An application shortcut or a panel shortcut? It appears that it is both. 

This makes it an annoying event that consistently produces confusion rather than efficiency.

Someone needs to go back into the code and get rid of the conflict, or at least fix the idea that newly assigned, single alpha-numeric KBSCs behave application-wide regardless of panel focus as is indicated by the purple color they display when they are created.

Any side-bets on how long it will take Adobe to acknowledge and fix this intrusion on an otherwise efficient workflow?