Keyboard Shortcuts

Preceden supports a handful of keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl/Cmd + A and the arrow keys act on the timeline you are looking at and do nothing while your cursor is inside a text box. Esc is the exception: closing a dialog works from inside a text box too. The last two sections below run the other way around, and apply only while you are typing in a field.

Add an event

Ctrl/Cmd + A, on a timeline you can edit. Nothing happens if a dialog is already open.

Jump to search

Esc puts your cursor in the Search box above the timeline. Press Esc again from inside the box to clear what you typed and step back out.

Close a dialog (without saving any changes)

Esc. While a dialog is open, Esc closes the dialog rather than jumping to search, and if you have the icon picker or the color picker open, the first Esc closes just the picker.

This one fires from inside the dialog's own fields, so pressing Esc while you are typing in an event's notes closes the dialog and loses what you had typed. Click Save first if you want to keep it.

Leave Presentation Mode

Esc, which takes you back to the normal editor. See Presentation Mode for the rest of that view.

Drag an event left and right

Hold Shift, then click and hold an event to drag it left and right if the event supports it.

Scroll horizontally while zoomed in

Use the left and right arrow keys. They scroll the timeline only after you zoom in by clicking and dragging across it or by choosing Zoom into date range, since otherwise the whole date range already fits on screen.

Submit a form from the notes area

Ctrl/Cmd + Enter, while you are editing the notes of an event, layer or timeline. It submits the dialog with the changes you've made.

Plain Enter starts a new paragraph in notes, so holding Ctrl/Cmd is how you tell Preceden to submit the form instead.

In the Bulk Editor

The Bulk Editor has a set of its own, and they work the other way around: they apply while your cursor is in one of its fields. Enter moves down the name column and starts a new event row when it reaches the end of a layer, Tab and Shift + Tab move one field forward or back along a row, and the Up and Down arrow keys move to the same field in the event above or below. That article shows each one in action.