I keep bumping into non-working keyboard shortcuts and I believe that this is due to the fact that I don’t use an ANSI keyboard layout but rather an ISO layout, more specifically a Nordic layout (but I’d expect to see similar issues on German, French and other layouts.
Here’s the thing: whenever a shortcut includes a character that requires a modifier key on my layout, it will fail because the modifier key is not part of the shortcut. But I need it to produce another part of the shortcut. A catch-22 situation, in other words. (Alternatively, as in the example below, the required modifier is also part of the shortcut but it is already “used up” for producing part of the shortcut so that the shortcut remains incomplete.)
Example: MacOS has the predefined Shortcut Shift-CMD-/
to access the Help menu in any application. On my keyboard, I need to press Shift-7
to produce a /
. But pressing Shift-CMD-7
is seen by MacOS as just that, not as Shift-CMD-/
I’m sure I’m not the first one to experience this issue, but strangely, I cannot find any discussion on this here on the forum or elsewhere. I’m probably searching for the wrong terms, so I’m asking this question instead: what is the best way to solve this?
My adhoc modification was to change the shortcut to Shift-CMD-7
but I’m not sure if I’m overwriting some other shortcut in doing so (will MacOS tell me if I do?). I’m not to worried about this specific shortcut, but in others the solution might be more difficult.
Also, as a new Mac user, I’m puzzled by the fact that Apple delivers an operating system with default shortcuts that are impossible to type on the keyboard I have specified in the setup. Is this really so or am I missing something? (Yes, the problem with shortcuts not working on all keyboard layouts is not specific to MacOS and I do recall bumping into this on windows, but I don’t think that was at the OS level but some application that I wrote off as simply being US-centric (which probably didn’t allow me to use 24h time or set Monday as the first day of the week either).