Japanese IME blocks single-key shortcuts in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro on Windows

Japanese IME blocks single-key shortcuts in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro on Windows

I’d like to hear from Adobe users outside the English-speaking world.

While working in Photoshop on Windows, I noticed a small but surprisingly disruptive interaction between Adobe’s single-key shortcuts and Japanese IME.

For example:

I’m renaming a layer in Japanese with IME enabled.
Then I press V to switch to the Move Tool.

But instead of Adobe receiving the shortcut, the keystroke is handled by the IME.

The result is a moment where the user thinks they have switched tools — but they haven’t.

In real work, that can mean moving the wrong object, typing into the wrong place, or simply stopping to figure out why the shortcut did not respond.

I can reproduce similar behavior in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro on Windows.

What interests me most is that this may not be only a Japanese-language issue.

Many Adobe users around the world work with input methods for languages such as:

• Chinese

• Korean

• Japanese

• and other multilingual input environments

English-language users can usually press a single-key shortcut and expect the application to react immediately.

Users working through an IME or another input method may have an additional input layer sitting between the keyboard and the application.

That difference seems small, but when shortcuts are used hundreds of times a day, it becomes part of the usability of the application itself.

So I’d especially like to ask users outside English-speaking environments:

Does your language or input method ever interfere with Adobe keyboard shortcuts?

If you use Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or another multilingual input system, I’d be very interested to know:

Which language, OS, Adobe application, and shortcut are affected?

If this happens across multiple languages, it may be worth looking at this not simply as a “Japanese IME issue,” but as a broader multilingual input and shortcut-handling problem.

Adobe has made many improvements for international users over the years, so I think this is an area where further refinement could have a surprisingly large everyday impact.

I’d love to hear what other users around the world are experiencing.