Assign a keyboard shortcut to an Action

[MikeFromMesa]

I know how to assign a keyboard shortcut to an action I create, but how do you assign a keyboard shortcut to an action that already exists?

I have an action that I downloaded to do some layer modifications and call an external plugin. The action works well but I want to assign a keyboard shortcut to it but can find no way to do that, and it is involved enough that I don't want to create it manually, even though I could assign a shortcut to it while creating it. I have looked all through the context menu for the Actions Panel and could find nothing that allows me to create a shortcut for an action already in the Action Panel.

As an alternative I tried to create the shortcut when I imported the action, but that did not work either.

Is there any way to do either?

UPDATE:

Apparently my problem was that I had the Action name selected and not the first part of the Action. When I selected that I was presented with the dialog box to add a shortcut to the Action so my problem has been solved.

[Chuck Uebele · Accepted solution]

Although you already found one answer, you can go to the Action panel menu (hamburger icon) and select "Action Options." Then the dialog box will come up to assign the KBSC.

[MikeFromMesa]

Yes. Thank you.

The key seems to be that you must have the first entry in the Action selected, not the name of the Action. If you use the name you do not get these options.

[Chuck Uebele]

I just selected the action, and had no problem bringing up the options panel to add a KBSC. 

[MikeFromMesa]

PerhapsI am using the wrong terminology, but when I select the Action Name I do not get the option to set a keyboard shortcut but when I select the first item in the Action I do get the option. Here are screen shots of the first and second cases and you can see that the Action Options selection is not available in the first.

First selection - Option not availableSecond selection - option is available

[Chuck Uebele · Accepted solution]

It looks like you're on the action set, rather than an individual action, so, yea, you wouldn't be able to set a KBSC from there. It sounded like you had to select the first step of an individual action to set the KBSC.

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

If you require more flexibility in your keyboard shortcuts than is offered via actions, the action can be referenced by a keyboard shortcut applied to a script:

https://prepression.blogspot.com/2016/11/photoshop-scripting-actions.html

app.doAction("My Action","My Action Set.atn");

Yes, it is convoluted, but that is the price to pay for a better keyboard shortcut!

[MikeFromMesa]

That looks like a good solution. I will try that.

Thank you for the suggestion.

[MikeFromMesa]

Well, I guess I am going to have to learn some Photoshop scripting after all. A simple script using the app.doAction command continues to give me a syntax error and I am not sure why. The only solution I know is to learn enough of scripting to figure out what is going on.

I suspect that the issue involves learning enough of the Photoshop SDK to figure out how to write basic scripts as javascript itself is pretty basic. I guess I have been avoiding that because it seemed like a lot of trouble to create a simple script, but it is what it is. 

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

The only reason I mentioned this route was because the action keycuts are not that great.

I am guessing that the file is saved as an RTF and not plain text. Just use NotePad or another simple editor on Windows, on a Mac TextEdit provides both rich and plain text options, so be careful or just use BBEdit or another plain text editor. Ensure that the script has a .jsx extension and not TXT.

https://prepression.blogspot.com/2017/11/downloading-and-installing-adobe-scripts.html

[MikeFromMesa]

Created a script calling the action and that now works with a regular keyboard shortcut. Thanks for the suggestion.