Spacebar Shortcut: Hand Tool Not Showing and Not Working

[artlambi]

When working on a document (in PS cs6) and pressing the spacebar to quickly access the hand tool it doesn't do anything.

What I've tried so far:

• resetting the presets
• change the shortcut key (wasn't possible)
• reinstall
• googled

Any suggestions ?

PS: I'm aware there is a kinda similar problem for windows users which has been discussed here but there are slight differences between my problem and the one for windows users.

[station_two · Accepted solution]

Try repeatedly hitting the H key and the Space Bar a number of times, each in quick succession.

I haven't gotten that since CS4, and at that time it was an older version of MS Entourage running in the background that was triggering the disabling the H key and the Spacebar to call up the hand.

If it doesn't work, you haven't damaged anything and lost only a few seconds. 

[artlambi]

Thanks for the suggestion, didn't work though

[Jesse Brown]

I'm running parellels(9) windows 7, and this is what appeared to be causing the issue for me. As soon as I closed Parallels my spacebar shortcut started working again. It continued to work even after I relaunched parallels.

[Andylarkin]

I too had Parallels open and once I had quit that, the Hand Tool (H) started working again ion all my Adobe apps

Thanks for mentioning it. It was driving me loopy.

[the_wine_snob]

What Tool do you have selected, when trying to access the Hand Tool via the Spacebar? For instance, if you have selected the Text Tool, the Spacebar will NOT access the Hand Tool, but will type spaces.

If you select the Handtool in the Toolbox, does it then work?

Good luck,

Hunt

[kfitfk]

I have the same problem in CS6.

The spacebar works fine until yesterday I worked with gif images using timeline panel.

Hit the space plays the gif animation.

And now I can't change to hand tool using spacebar.

Anyone knows the solution??

[togglemedia]

Same issue here. Spacebar just stopped toggling the hand tool in PS CS6 today. Not sure how to get it back.

[togglemedia]

Interestingly enough, toggling the hand tool is also not working in Illustrator. Obviously, the space bar is working, else I wouldn't be able to type these sentences.

[Guest]

Have you seen this thread?  If not perhaps some useful info.  http://forums.adobe.com/message/4411318

[togglemedia]

Hi Curt, Yes, I 've seen that thread. Nothing on there was able to help resolve the issue. It was working on Friday.

[Guest]

You may just have to reset the preferences if it work last week and you have changed nothing.  A re-install will not affect this file.

Start PS and immediately hold down the Ctrl + Alt + Shift keys.  You will get a reset window.  If you see splash screen you are too late.

[togglemedia]

Thanks Curt. I just did a restart, and everything has returned to normal. For others having this issue, maybe a computer restart will help you.

[Guest]

I usuallly forget to mention trying rebooting computer as figure that would be first thing most people would try.  Rebooting, and turning off the computer when not using it, was SOP for the old guys.  But today many never turn them off, or even disconnect from internet.  Shows my age and resistance to change.

[togglemedia]

Rebooting the whole computer is definitely not the first thing I try. I suppose it's naive of me to think that a modern OS, and applications built on top of it, would require that type of solution. What are we running Mac OS9 still? Ha ha. As a fellow old guy, I've come to expect more from my OS and Adobe than what I'm currently getting.

[uelij]

That's it! So simple yet solves 90% of my problems. Not having the H shortcut drives me mad in 30 seconds!

[Des7]

I don't think this is it, as I would bet that Adobe's software is smarter than this, but it's worth mentioning.  There's a bilingual keyboard layout feature built into windows that affects certain distributions of Windows (mostly ASUS and Acer but some other too) where they sort of pretend to have 2 keyboards even though they don't.  If it happens again, you probably accidentally tripped the keyboard switcher so just hit ctrl + shift and in theory, it would switch back.

There's no actual fix for it though unfortunately.

[MikeV1234]

Go to  Metro UI> Settings > PC and Devices > Trackpad > Touchpad - 

• Deactivate the Touchpad Delay.

Also:

I used a different wireless mouse which worked fine. The issue is possibly related to Mouse/Touch problems.

[mikew44535416]

I'm using OS 10.6.8 and Illustrator CS6 and have had the same problem with the spacebar. I discovered it was confilcting with Fetch 4. Upgrading to Fetch 5 seems to have fixed the problem - but we will see.