How to redefine keyboard shortcut for Clear/Delete ?

[Lee James]

I'm relatively new to After Effects and trying to set up my shortcuts. One thing I do in all my applications is set Delete to the 'D' key. (Because I want all the most important shortcuts right under my hand, without having to move my hand much.)

So I went to Keyboard Shortcuts and located the shortcut for Edit > Clear

By default, it's assigned to three keys: "Delete", "(Num)", and "Backspace"

To this, I also added "D".

But this only half works. I can now use D to delete objects in the timeline, but I can't use it to delete media in the Project window.

I also tried removing the other shortcut keys ("Delete", "(Num)", and "Backspace") - so that "D" is the only key. Now if I look in the Edit menu, next to "Clear" it does have "D" as the shortcut, yet pressing D still doesn't work (even though it works when I click on the menu item).

Am I doing something wrong here, or is this some kind of bug?

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Sounds like a bug. Please file a Bug Report. Meanwhile, CTRL+X does a cut and it's something I use a lot (it's under the left-hand too). It's also a default keystroke and it works in all applicable panels.

[Lee James]

Thank you Roland,

I know that a cut does the job, but you lose anything important in the copy buffer, so deleting is vastly preferable to cutting.

[Rick Gerard]

I have not tried to reassign the delete key because I don't want it behaving differently in different apps. It would drive me crazy.

If you successfully reassigned the delete function in the timeline using the Shortcut editor then you are only reassigning keys in the timeline. If there is no option in the Project Panel section or in the Comp Panel section then there is no bug. Some keyboard shortcuts are locked. A feature request to unlock all operations in all panels is probably not going to go very far because a lot of thought and some universal software conventions drive those decisions. If you really want to unlock the delete key for all panels that's all you can do, then hope that there enough other requests for the same thing to encourage a half dozen people to spend some time discussing the option, decide in your favor, then pay for a programmer to rewrite the code, test it, send it out for beta testing, make sure it didn't foul anything else up, and then publish the change in a future release.