Enter vs Return

I just started a trial of EagleFiler and I’m strongly considering switching over from DEVONthink, but I have what seems like a really silly issue which is currently blocking that switch. As background, I keep one library for digitized correspondence, so I have a lot of PDFs which I try to keep organized pretty much as I would in a filing cabinet. I frequently scan in batches ranging from 10s to 100s of documents at a time, and let Acrobat Pro deal with creating searchable PDFs in a batch afterwards. Then I import all the searchable PDFs into DT (hopefully soon EF) and only at that point do I bother to go through and give meaningful titles to the documents. With DT I don’t see the distinction between title and filename - of course, this is because DT pretends to have a proprietary database format (really all the files are in a package, but that’s supposed to be opaque to the user), but with EF I obviously see both - and the transparancy of EF’s filing system is a big part of the draw for me, so this is great.

The problem, however, arises when it comes to the renaming, as both my MacBook Pro’s internal keyboard and the external keyboard I use have easy access to the Return key but convoluted access to the Enter key. The MBP’s Enter is only accessible via fn+Return and on the Kinesis (external) it’s even worse - I have to change mode to get the numeric keypad keys, then hit Enter, then change mode back to type anything. This means that when trying to quickly rename many files in EF, I have to use the mouse - which is not remotely as quick as if I had an Enter key.

The question, then, is if there’s some way for me to change the keyboard shortcuts for file renaming - ⌘⇧O already does a perfectly good job of opening the files, so I’d be happy to just map Return to file renaming. However, the suggested method of using Apple’s Keyboard preference pane to set shortcuts only works for menu items, and as best as I can see there’s no menu item for renaming a file, so that isn’t an option for me.

Thanks for mentioning this issue. My MacBook Pro and MacBook are older and have a real Enter key. Now that Apple has removed it, I think it makes sense to let Return enter edit mode. I’ll try to get this change into the next maintenance update. Meanwhile, you could try attaching a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript in order to rename files.

First off, thanks for responding so promptly - this really reinforces my inclination to use EF…

<wearing egg>
How embarrassing for me: I just realised my problem is entirely in my external keyboard (which I use 99% of the time) - my MBP has an Enter key which I never use next to the right command key.
</wearing egg>

That probably makes this change pretty unimportant for you and most other users, as there won’t be a lot of keyboards out there like mine which lack an enter key… That said, if you don’t mind me sharing my opinion, the Enter/Return distinction is a pretty weak one for most users and most external keyboards put Enter way out on the numeric keypad so it’s really not accessible for normal typing, so I’d still advocate you to make this change. Alternately, another good change would be to make a menu item for edit filename (and maybe edit title) so that keyboard mapping for these functions can be done without applescripting.

Thanks again - off to the script editor I go :wink:

Even though it turns out that your keyboard does have an Enter key, the new MacBook and MacBook Pro ones do not. Eventually, these will be the norm. I think Enter is much more useful than a second Option key, but I guess Apple disagrees.

Indeed, I wish my external keyboard had one next to the spacebar. I use Enter all the time in OmniFocus, and it requires more movement than I’d like.

I think that’s probably not worth the clutter. If Return works out of the box, would anyone want to change the mapping?

In EagleFiler 1.4.3, Return and Enter can both be used to enter edit mode.

Thanks! It’s really great to see how promptly you respond to requests and comments on the forum.