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Participant
June 29, 2025
Question

Some perplexing annoyances

  • June 29, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 132 views

I'm doing physics, my needs are simple, but several things are driving me to baldness. 1) For no apparent reason I'll hit some random key and suddenly all the tools disappear. Even the list of files open at the top of the screen is gone. I don't remember what all the dozens of tools are called, and so I can either spend my precious time (to me) trying to rememeber them or quit the app and restart. Then there's the precious 3D transparent overlay of the corner of a city block or a bank of servers that appears for some exotic reason with no clue how to get rid of it. It looks like some kind of perspectival creation that I'm sure makes someone in development very proud. But I don't want it, I don't need it, and it's so EXTREMELY INTRUSIVE that when I save my work, shut down Illustrator, and hope to never see it again, to my dismay, it's been saved with my document. IT'S NOW A PART OF MY DOCUMENT. Is there an adult version of Illustrator?

2 replies

Community Expert
June 30, 2025

Illustrator has a great deal of keyboard shortcuts. In fact, the application has so many shortcuts that I often keep my left hand near the Ctrl+Z portion of the keyboard just in case I need to undo some keystroke I accidentally fat-fingered when I meant to do something else. That portion of the keyboard is also near some of the most important shortcut key combinations.

Kurt Gold
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 29, 2025

The regular version of Illustrator provides some shortcuts to hide/show certain UI elements.

 

For example, hitting the "F" key (repeatedly) will hide all panels to temporarily get rid of any possibly distracting GUI elements.

 

Similar to that, you can press the Tab key to do almost the same. Shift + Tab key will hide all panels, but not the main Tools panel.

 

Illustrator also provides a perspective grid that can be turned on and off by hitting the default keyboard shortcut Shift + Ctrl + I. If required, you can assign a custom shortcut to show/hide it. Or fully remove it.

 

No exotic phantoms, just traditional functionalities.