In today’s SAP Development Community, more and more MacBook’s are being used. With the latest development tools in the cloud (SAP Web IDE & SAP Web IDE Full-Stack) or made for multiple operating systems (Eclipse), we as developers are no longer required to use Windows.
SAP Web IDE Shortcuts
When developing Fiori and UI5 apps using SAP Web IDE, I want to use as many shortcuts as possible to speed up the development. I noticed this won’t always work as desired on a Mac. The shortcuts can cause side effects which will make them unusable. Some shortcuts can be customized, but not all.
For example, you can use these shortcuts to switch between tabs:
- Move to the tab on the right: Alt + R
- Move to the tab on the left: Alt + Q
Unfortunately, these shortcuts can’t be customized.
What’s the cause of this problem?
In macOS these shortcuts also have a function. So when choosing Alt + Q in Web IDE the screen is moving one tab to the left, but on the source tab there is also a Å’’ symbol added to the file:
This is very annoying.
The solution
Symbols like Å’’ are rarely used by me, so I decided to turned this particular function off. This is possible in a very easy way!
In macOS you can add custom keybindings by saving a property list like the one below as ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict.
Create a folder named KeyBindings’ in the Library’ folder if it doesn’t exist already. Also create a text-file named DefaultKeyBinding.dict’. After that it should look like this:
File DefaultKeyBinding.dict’ contains new keybindings for Alt + R and Alt + Q. I created a dummy function for these shortcuts:
{ "~q" = ("insertText:", ""); "~r" = ("insertText:", ""); }Restart the application, aka the browser and start SAP Web IDE. Enjoy your shortcuts!
