How do we add copy and paste to the right click menu?

[Glen Charles Rowell]

In almost all Adobe products copy and paste are in the right click menu but I can't find a way to turn them on in Illustrator. How do I get them to show up or even request an update to the program if they aren't in the program for some strange reason. Why would they be left out? Can we also use scripting to add other useful comands to the menu to save time while we work?

[CarlosCanto · Accepted solution]

there isn't a setting for adding commands to the right click menu. Scripting can't help adding commands to the menu either.

check this thread for how to submit a feature request

https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator-discussions/simple-steps-to-submit-a-feature-request-or-r...

[Glen Charles Rowell]

CarlosCanto thank you so much for the link. I posted it there as well. If it's okay could you vote on it as well. It looks like they work on stuff based on votes now 😕 https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/939477-illustrator-desktop-beta-pr-bugs/suggestions/4523447... 

[CarlosCanto]

as an alternative, you could record a couple of actions to copy and paste. Then you could easily play them back with a single F keystroke or click. You could play them even easier by turning Button Mode on in the Action's menu.

[Glen Charles Rowell]

I might need to go to hospital this week and I'm not going to be able to use my left arm for a while after that 😕 Thank you for the great idea though. I'm just gonna have to take the right hand off the mouse to do certain things. It's a bit sad the accessability settings aren't better in these programs. A right click copy and paste would be a real time saver. 

[Kurt Gold]

A rather insane point in this case is that this has been requested for more than two decades. I cannot explain why it isn't there, but sometimes I think some kind of unexplainable sloppiness or stubbornness are the reasons. I'm pretty sure it would not take more than one or two hours to implement it and make it available in the contextual menu.

Apart from that, it would be even better to be able to add any desired command to the contextual menu (and even save and store that as custom menu sets that could be activated depending on specific needs). But that would be, of course, more complicated to incorporate.

[Conrad_C]

The problem is Illustrator-specific, for some unknown reason. In general, Adobe applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, and the video applications have extensive, long lists of extremely relevant commands in their context menus. But historically, Illustrator context menus have been very weak and lacking obvious commands. For example, if you select a blend, its context menu has no commands that will let you edit that blend. Or if you select a linked image, the context menu has no commands for link management, Image Trace, etc.

What has been happening recently is that many useful context-sensitive functions have been added to the new-ish Properties panel (though not copy/paste), and the Properties panel is probably more discoverable for new users. But power users accustomed to rich context menus in other Adobe applications still aren’t finding those in Illustrator.

[Ben Tank]

This was added in the latest release (including some extra options as shown) with no announcement that I can find. To be fair I've only been asking for 23 years. 😛