"Align Hotkeys" with Keyboard Maestro
I have a confession to make. I'm a hotkey addict. Whenever there's repeating tasks at work, I start searching for new keyboard shortcuts, all for a faster workflow. When new shortcuts cannot be found, or is not within reach from my Left hand, I invent new ones.
Apps I use every week at work include:
Flash CS6 (for older banner formats & importing AE animations)
Something I always do is: Aligning stuff. To the center, to the left, to the bottom right... Sometimes based on canvas and sometimes based on objects in relationship to each other. Have always been clicking the Align Window, it started feeling tedious.
So I came up with a new aligning hotkey system, game inspired. I "Game'ified" my align workflow.
In games like Quake, Doom and Half-Life, you used the keys W,A,S,D with your left hand for moving around. Shooting and turning with your mouse in your right hand. W was forward, A - left, S - down and D - to the right. This became second nature.
When I work, my left hand is always on my keyboard in the same position, the other hand is holding a Wacom pen.
I'm on a Mac, so the CMD key does the same thing the CTRL key does on a PC. The CTRL key on Mac is there, but not used very often. It's in the perfect position to be used for whatever new hotkey combo you prefer. With Keyboard Maestro, that is. A hotkey remapping and macro creation app.
With Keyboard Maestro, You can create different hotkeys for different apps. You can even do more than one hotkey combination or even mouse clicks inside that software.
My new system looks like this, holding down CTRL and hitting these:
And I use CTRL + TAB as a toggle between aligning to objects or to the canvas.
This is setup for all of the apps mentioned above, so it's the same in Illustrator as in Flash and After Effects. Had to do some adjusting for each though... After Effects does not have hotkeys for it, so I place the Align window at the top right location and keep it there. And use Keyboard Maestro's mouse clicks instead. And for Illustrator I have to create a macro for each key and trigger that.
Here's how it looks inside Keyboard Maestro:
Along with some other hotkeys that might give you ideas. In After Effects, you can jump 10 frames forward with Shift + PageDown. I have done a hotkey for doing that inside Flash as well.
Here is how I solved it in After Effects, you can record how you click and save those actions with Keyboard Maestro, then launching it with a hotkey:
