How to use all SAP Web IDE shortcuts on a Mac

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 ‘Œ’ symbol added to the file:

This is very annoying.

The solution
Symbols like ‘Œ’ 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!