^H keyboard shortcut — what does it do, how do I disable it?

[noahtye]

Hi folks! I love Alfred but there's one thing that's bugged me for a while — the ^H (control-h) shortcut.

 

I never use the backspace key on my Mac; I always type ^H. It's way quicker for me, it's on home row (I'm on Dvorak; for you QWERTY users that's ^J) and I've rebound Caps Lock to Control.

 

If I type something in Alfred and want to delete it, I try pressing ^H as is my habit. About half the time (I'm not sure the exact conditions), it opens a "Text Action" menu with options to copy, paste, save in snippets, open in Dictionary, etc. Seems like a useful menu, but the default keybinding is completely unusable for me.

 

I've looked through all the preferences, googled for "alfred control h shortcut", and looked through the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet with no success. What is this feature, and how do I rebind this shortcut to something else?

[Vero]

@noahtye Welcome to the forum.

 

⌃H isn't a default hotkey in Alfred, so could you open the preferences to Features > Universal Actions > General and see what hotkey you've set there?

 

If you've set it there, you can either change it or remove it (if you don't use Universal Actions from Finder/other apps) with backspace.

 

If it isn't set in that location, open your Workflows and click the three dots at the top of the sidebar. Under Display Options, show the hotkeys, which will allow you to scan down your list of workflows and see if you've set ⌃H anywhere as a hotkey.

 

Let me know how you get on.

[noahtye]

Hi @Vero, thanks for the reply! In following your instructions and trying to better document my issue, I discovered the issue has something to do with the way Alfred handles "show actions" with "ctrl", so I just disabled that behavior. Details follow.

 

Attached is a screenshot of Features > Universal Actions > General on my machine, it seems to indicate `⌥⌘\` is my shortcut for "Show Actions". But even after pressing Backspace and removing the hotkey, the behavior described above still persisted.

 

See how, in my screenshot, `fn` and `ctrl` are also checked? I noticed there's a feature where if you tap `fn` or `ctrl` it opens the action menu for the current text. And, perhaps due to a bug in Alfred, or perhaps due to my strange keyboard setup (I'm remapping keys with Karabiner and have Caps Lock set to Control), holding down Control to type `^H` would sometimes register as tapping Control, triggering this Show Actions menu.

 

The solution for me was to simply uncheck `ctrl` in the `Show Actions` section. Hopefully this is helpful to someone else in the future.