Sound Effect Source (Obsidian)

Tech Support
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1

This might be a dumb question for a number of reasons, but how do I know why I’m getting my alert sound for a given thing?

I like to keep shortcuts consistent across apps for obvious reasons, and ⌃⌘↓ is my preferred shortcut for moving lines down in text editors/notes apps. In Obsidian, every time I do this, it plays the “alert sound” I have set in the Sound Effects system preference. It still moves the line down, but this is beginning to grate on me. No other app I use this shortcut in does this, and my move line up shortcut (⌃⌘↑) does not trigger the same sound effect in Obsidian.

I don’t even know what program is triggering the sound. I don’t know what other app could be bugged that keyboard shortcut is getting pressed, but when I look through Obsidian’s shortcuts, I don’t see any conflicts with that shortcut.

Soundsource shows it coming from Sound Effects, but that doesn’t tell me what’s triggering the sound effect.

2

I think the alert sound means the keyboard shortcut you are using is simply not defined in Obsidian. Obsidian is an app based on the non-native Electron framework so typical Mac behaviors often do not work.

Edit to add: Doesn’t Obsidian provide a method to let you assign your own keyboard commands?

3

I tried assigning ⌘ ^ ↓ to a random hotkey and it also beeps for me.

One thing you can do is re-assigned the alert sound to something less jarring. I picked a very quiet chirp like noise.

1 Like
4

Does Obsidian even have an editing command to move a line of text up or down? You need to assign THAT command to the ^⌘↓ keyboard shortcut.

5

Yes, I did so through Obsidian’s keyboard shortcuts interface (screenshot shows what the command palette displays)

CleanShot 2022-07-11 at 13.46.07@2x
CleanShot 2022-07-11 at 13.46.07@2x1402×364 21.9 KB

Edit: It’s not assigned the way you would an unbound menu item in an AppKit app, instead it’s through a custom interface inside of Obsidian for “hotkeys.”

6

I’m afraid this is probably the solution. For other purposes on my Mac, I like my sound effects as-is (Sonumi!) so I guess it’s an Obsidian problem that I solve go over to their forums to bring up…

Edit: What do you know, it is an electron issue and there’s a workaround.

Edit2: tl;dr from the issue thread linked in that other link for anyone else who finds this and something should deadlink, they advice given is:

  1. Go to ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict (may require creating)
  2. Add or append…
{
    "^@\UF701" = "noop:";
    "^@\UF702" = "noop:";
    "^@\UF703" = "noop:";
}

I have absolutely 0 idea what this does in practice, but it stopped the beeping for me.