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clairec
Participant
April 3, 2025
Question

cannot reduce selection character by character at the end of a word

  • April 3, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 218 views

I am running Sequoia 15.3.2 with the current version of InDesign. I've always been able to select a whole word (Comm-Shft-right arrow) and then if I wanted to omit the last character of the word, I would simply release the Command key and, keeping the Shift key down, tap the left arrow. Now when I do that, the selection expands to the space to the left of the first letter of the word, instead of contracting the selection by one character at the end of the word. I've trashed the InDesign Preferences to no avail. Would appreciate some help, or is this a new bug?

2 replies

leo.r
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 3, 2025

I can only confirm the behavior you report (the undesirable one) on both Ventura and Sequoia, InDesign 20.2 and 20.1.

 

This seems to be consistent though with the shortcut specified in InDesign:

 

 

I don't see any explicitly specified InDesign shortcuts that control deselecting characters.

 

I don't know if it has always been like this or changed recently.

 

In other apps, where the default system behavior is used, Shift-Left Arrow behaves the way you prefer. This behavior doesn't apply to InDesign though even if you remove the assigned shortcut in InDesign (in which case, Shift-Left Arrow will simply do nothing).

leo.r
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 3, 2025

P.S. Actually, I now discovered the following weird thing:

 

On Ventura, if you select some words with Shift-Cmd-Right Arrow, then select one or more characters with Shift-Right Arrow, well then using Shift-Left Arrow will work as you desire.

 

However, it won't happen on Sequoia: Shift-Left Arrow will always work the way you don't like.

 

 

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
April 3, 2025

If nothing else, you can remap the behavior in Keyboard Preferences.