Hello! Does anyone know how to change keyboard shortcuts in ELAN? I work with Hindi and the shortcuts that I use to transcribe Devanagari are also shortcuts in ELAN for certain functions. Currently, I copy paste the letters that I need (such as ḍ and ṃ) but it would be extremely helpful if I could just type them out without deleting my entire annotation, for example.
Hello,
the manual describes how to change or delete keyboard shortcuts, in this chapter. Hopefully it works!
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Thank you @hasloe, this was very helpful! I’m not sure how it works on PC, but on MacBook there is the general preference pane for each software where I had tried to find the change shortcut option. Good that you guided me to find there was another preference pane!
Hi, good that it was helpful.
On any platform ELAN’s keyboard shortcuts can only be edited inside ELAN. I was wondering which general preference pane on macOS you are referring to. Not the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard System Preferences, I assume? I believe that only allows to change shortcuts for some system application and services, not for any installed application, or does it?
-Han
Hi Han,
This is the preference pane I was referring to:
It doesn’t allow to change any settings for keyboard shortcuts, but somehow I didn’t manage to find the other preferences menu before posting my question - which has probably more to do with me overlooking the option than anything else. 
Ah ok, I now understand. That’s just another way to get to the Edit->Preferences->Edit Preferences panel. But it might be good to have a link or button in that main preferences pane to the Edit Shortcuts window.
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That’s indeed what I was hoping to find there, initially.
It would be nice to be able to turn off all shortcuts. Going through and deleting each and every shortcut takes a long time.
Hello,
We can add this to the wish list. I believe most users would like to have more actions available for keyboard shortcut assignment, but there may be reasons to disable them altogether.
In the meanwhile, for anyone who wants to disable shortcuts and doesn’t want to go through editing them all one-by-one, here is a possible “workaround”.
In ELAN go to Edit->Preferences->Edit Shortcuts... change one shortcut, click Save and quit ELAN. There will now be a file shortcuts1.pfsx in ELAN’s (platform dependent) data/preferences folder. This is an XML file which can be opened in an XML or text editor. It contains several prefGroup elements containing prefList elements, like the example below:
<prefGroup key="Menu.Options.AnnotationMode"> <prefList key="CommandActions.ModifyAnnotationTime"> <String>10</String> <String>130</String> </prefList> .... </prefGroup>
By removing all prefList elements from all prefGroup elements (see next example) and then saving the file, the shortcuts should be gone next time ELAN is opened.
<prefGroup key="Shortcuts.Common"> </prefGroup>
-Han
Hi Han,
Thank you for the response. Your suggestion to take out all of the shortcuts worked! This sure saved a lot of time. Now I can work on figuring out a work around to the difficulties we are having with ELAN and Keyman on M2 Macs. I am using Keyboard Maestro to “mimic” the keystrokes Keyman uses to type in two different orthographic extended unicode characters in Kwakwala (ISO:kwk). Anyways, I’ll let you know how this works out.
Mac M2 ELAN 6.7-M1 and KEYMAN
By now, it is pretty well known that ELAN combined with Keyman does not work on Mac M2 computers. The assumption is that the JAVA programming language (the release for Apple silicon macs) does not allow a switch to an alternate keyboarding encoder (not sure if this is the correct terminology). There are some other issues, for example, pressing spacebar in ELAN while typing an annotation on a MAC M2 brings up the " box, while shift space bar puts in a space. Another peculiar quirk is that ELAN and Keyman play together on M1’s ???
I removed all of the ELAN shortcuts and used Keyboard Maestro to develop keystrokes to access the extended Unicode characters required to type in Kwakwala (ISO:kwk). I do not need to have Keyman running. It works for me, but I can’t seem to reprogram the spacebar to be spacebar (I can use shift spacebar or option spacebar etc.). There are probably other issues…
I removed all of the ELAN shortcuts to avoid any potential interference with the keyboard macros I was making.
Some suggestions for ELAN programmers: If you gave users the capacity to add keyboard reassignments in ELAN macros we would not need to use Keyman.
Do I understand correctly that ELAN and Keyman work together on M1 but not on M2? I don’t suppose it could be a matter of Security and Privacy settings (similar to these; probably not, because then it wouldn’t work with other applications either)?
I’m not familiar with the problem with the space bar as you describe it. The space bar can have a function which is defined on a higher level than within ELAN when there is no text editor active (e.g. if a button has been clicked, pressing the space bar then repeats the action of that button, virtually clicks it again; this is not defined by or implemented in ELAN itself). But when a text edit field is active, I haven’t seen anything similar to what you describe. (Does this happen even when no alternative keyboard has been selected?)
Your last suggestion is already on the wish list, but is not a trivial feature to implement. Especially if a virtual keyboard should be visible as well. There are some alternative ‘input methods’ available in ELAN, most of them based on a rather old input method framework, building something similar from scratch would require a lot of work.
Re. M1’s OK but Not M2’s = correct, supposedly a JAVA virtual machine issue whereby an alternative keyboard mapper, e.g. Keyman, is not available to ELAN. I haven’t yet had the time to switch to a different JVM to see if that fixes the problem.
In addition, M2’s have other issues, such as the spacebar key. The play-pause audio shortcut is supposed to be the shift-spacebar for ELAN:
play / pause media ctrl+space
play around annotation ctrl+shift+space
play/pause step and repeat ctrl+alt+space
play selection shift+space
On my M2, however, the “spacebar” (i.e. not shifted) functions in ELAN as “shift spacebar” and plays audio etc… In order to fix the problem, I used Keyboard Maestro to put in a space when I press ctrl+spacebar. I am still working on a work around using Keyboard Maestro to develop keyboard macros to simulate a “keyman” like work around.
In the meantime, our transcribers are using a combination of a note pad type program to type in the words to be transcribed, and then copies and pastes the entry into the tier.
So I guess the only suggestion is to examine the other JVMs. We are guessing that you include the ORACLE JVM in your ELAN install package since we get a “Java” not installed when we begin to install openjdk-21-02-2_macos-64.
The JVM’s included in ELAN distributions are OpenJDK builds downloaded from jdk.java.net.
In ELAN, when choosing View->View Log... the first lines print the Java version and runtime location (Java home).
Concerning the space bar problem: it’s still not clear to me whether this also occurs if no alternative keyboard has been selected, so with the system’s default language (locale) selected?
Thanks for the details on the OpenJDK.
Regarding the space bar problem. When I am in typing in Annotation mode or Transcription mode, whenever I press space I do not get a space. Instead, ELAN highlights the menu bar that has Grid_Text_Subtitles_Lexicon_Comments_Recognizers_Metadata_Controls
I haven’t tested out all of the ELAN functions, but spacebar doesn’t really work. For example, Typing in the comments screen the spacebar does not work.
This occurs whether I use the U.S. International - PC, the Unicode Hex Input, or Keyman.
If I press shift+spacebar, I get a space.
When I use other programs, such as MSWord, this doesn’t happen.
However, Audacity has similar issues. For example:
when I try to create labels, the spacebar does not work
when I edit metacodes, the spacebar does work
when I try to edit imported labels, the spacebar does not work
Like ELAN, I press shift+spacebar. to get a space
Oh yes, when I save a file, spacebar does work in ELAN. (so I am guessing that any call to a “system” function probably works, (I have not tested out all of the issues)
So, perhaps the issue is with the JAVA virtual machine.