Full keyboard access + global keyboard shortcuts for shortcuts = global hotkey for task entry on ipad

Oh yeah.
I am not sure when this happened, but when you enable full keyboard access on iPadOS, then you can assign global keyboard shortcuts for individual shortcuts!
So now I can add tasks from any app just like on the mac!
What a game changer.

Settings → accessibility → keyboards → commands

It is quite fiddly to activate the “Done” button of shortcuts’ text entry pop up with just the keyboard. Maybe I can configure this.
And i have to get used to the blue frames of full keyboard access. And sometimes the and don’t know how to get back to a text field, because apparently I am controlling something else with my keyboard. So there is a bit of a learning curve.

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Interesting! Haven’t tried this yet myself, but having had a quick look, it seems like you could clear all of the existing keyboard shortcuts and just implement your shortcuts ones? I’m wondering whether that would mitigate the fiddliness of working with keyboard access’ blue frames. I’d personally only want to work with this for a few global shortcuts, so if there was a way to enable those without the rest of the functionality that full keyboard access offers, I’d be happy…

At least there is hotkey for “pass through”, ie disable full access.
Now getting to the task entry takes to hotkeys: the first to enable full access (disable pass through) and the second to fire the shortcut.

Yeah— played with this a little bit earlier today. It seems that turning on full keyboard access prevents you from using CMD+shift+tab to reverse through the app switcher? Seems like a minor thing, but became a bit of a dealbreaker for the amount of time that I tried it.

If I can figure out a way around that, I might experiment further. Otherwise, I’ll probably stick with CMD+space for spotlight then typing the name of the shortcut I want from there. Not quite as elegant as a dedicated keyboard shortcut, but gets the job done…

Hi, was not using my ipad for a long time with a keyboard.
The full keyboard access is indeed quite strange.

How do you work with the shortcut? Is it keyboard only?
Today, i cannot even type in the Short cut “ask for input” pop up, because spotlight somehow keeps the keyboard focus.

I remember that on other days, i was sometimes able to type in the popup, but then i had to use my finger to tap the done button. - Edit: This seems to be working with ⌘ + Enter.

If you know a way to do this keyboard only, I would be very interested in it!

Hi! There are really only a few “global” shortcuts I need to use like this, including:

  • Project codes (opens a menu in Drafts that allows me to quickly filter for the name of a specific project and open related files, search for related notes or copy the project ID to paste into another app)
  • Log time (gives me options to record blocks of time direct to my calendar)
  • Today’s Journal (opens today’s journal in Drafts)

Most of the other shortcuts I currently use are context specific. Thus far, while it’s good to know about the possibility of using global key combos to trigger shortcuts, I’ve been fine with using CMD-SPACE to trigger a search then typing the first few letters of the shortcut I need. I’m using a prefix ("//") for each of those shortcut titles so that I can call them up easily— typing “//” in my Spotlight search then calls up a menu of my global shortcuts…

Also: Shortcuts can be really buggy, even all this time after iPadOS 15’s initial release. I still see that “unable to enter text into an ask-for-input prompt” bug on occasion, and for me it’s been a matter of adjusting my workflows to workaround the bugs. I’m grateful Shortcuts exists, but if I can script something in a way that doesn’t depend on Shortcuts, I’m more likely to take that option. At the moment, that looks like using Shortcuts to trigger Drafts actions, so Drafts is doing the heavy lifting. Drafts is obviously not a Shortcuts replacement, but depending on the intended outcome, it’s capable (if you know some JavaScript)…

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