How to Change Photoshop Shortcut for Selecting Layer Below on Mac?

Question

Hi, I'm trying to create an action in Photoshop. For this, I need to select the layer below the currently selected layer. The shortcut for this is Option + [. My problem is that my MacBook keyboard doesn't have a [ key. I can type [ by pressing Option + 9, but that means I can't use the Option + [ shortcut in Photoshop, because that would require pressing Option + Option + 9, which isn't possible.
I've tried changing the Photoshop shortcut from Option + [ to something else, but I can't find where to do this. Since I'm creating an action, I also can't manually click the desired layer, because that would record the layer name into the action, which makes it unusable in other files.
Does anyone know how to change the Option + [ shortcut in Photoshop so I can proceed with creating my action? Thank you!"

Conrad_C · Accepted Answer

What language keyboard does your Mac have? It seems strange that Apple would ship a keyboard with no [ key, because that key is required for some tasks in many languages.

if for some reason the keyboard literally does not have a [ key, can you get to it using the Keyboard Viewer built into macOS, and therefore on any Mac. If you enable the Show Input Menu in Menu Bar option in Keyboard settings, you can open Keyboard Viewer from the menu bar. This opens a software keyboard that you can customize. For example, you could have it display an extended US English keyboard, which most definitely does have a [ key on it, and use that to enter the [ key.

In the demo below, on my MacBook Pro I open macOS Keyboard Viewer. After making sure Photoshop has focus, I keep the Option key held down on the real keyboard, and to send the [ key, I don’t press it on the real keyboard, I click it on the software keyboard while still holding down the Option key on the real keyboard. As I do this, in Photoshop you can see that the layer selection is changing in the Layers panel, and you can also see that Photoshop is recording that in the Actions panel. So Photoshop accepted that as Option + [ and ] even though I never pressed the [ or ] key on my hardware keyboard.

After that, the demo shows changing the keyboard type to Extended, to demonstrate that you can use Keyboard Viewer to input keys that don’t even exist on your current real keyboard…my MacBook Pro certainly doesn’t have all of those extra keys like F19, but Keyboard Viewer can input them.

Stephen Marsh · Answer

@joonas_7982

You can hopefully use an action recorded from a full keyboard, I believe that I have shared my "layer navigation building blocks" action before, it should still be in my DropBox. I'll find the link...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dd9qpecqrvuon6e/Layer%20Navigation%20Building%20Blocks.atn?dl=0

Duplicate the action step in my action. Then just drag the action step out of my action into your action.

More here, particularly if the lower layer is skipped due to visibility:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/automate-batch-insert-unique-text-from-a-csv-file-to-multiple-different-images-in-photoshop/m-p/13934766

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/select-layer-above-or-beneath-current-layer-with-a-shortcut/m-p/14737983

Otherwise you could use a "helper" script to perform this step in the action.

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