CodonCode Aligner Forum

This post describes how to customize keyboard shortcuts in CodonCode Aligner. The process is a bit tedious and involves editing a text file, but if you often do the same thing and with it had a keyboard shortcut, it's worth the effort.

To customize keyboard shortcuts, you need to place a file called "Menu.properties" into the folder where the CodonCode Aligner preference data are stored. On Mac OS X, this is is a folder called "CodonCode Aligner Preferences" inside the Library/Preferences folder in your home directory. On Windows, this is a folder called "CodonCode Aligner" inside the AppData/Roaming folder in your home directory (C:/Users/<username>/). Note that both the Finder on OS X likes to hide the "Library" folders, and Explorer on Windows likes to hide the "App Data" folder, so you may need to change the system preferences to show hidden files (if you are not sure where the preferences are stored, you can also see the location in the "Aligner_errorlog.txt" file in the "Logs" folder where CodonCode Aligner is installed).

Step-by-step:

1. Locate where the CodonCode Aligner preferences are stored
2. Download a Zip archive with the default "Menu.properties" file from
   http://www.codoncode.com/support/MenuProperties.zip.
3. Extract the "Menu.properties" file from the downloaded archive and place it inside the preferences folder.
4. Open the Menu.properties file with a text editor like NotePad or TextEdit.
5. Locate the line with the action that you want to customize. For example, for "Delete to Sample end", find the line:
   SampleDelStart.Accelerator=
6. Add the keyboard shortcut you want to use, for example shift-DELETE:
   SampleDelEnd.Accelerator=shift DELETE
   Make sure you do not use a shortcut that is already in use by another action!
7. Save the edited file (make sure to save it as a text file, not as a Word document or similar!)

The next time you start CodonCode Aligner, you should be able to use your custom shortcut. If not, make sure that you saved the edited file to the correct location; that you did not add another extension to the file name (like ".txt"); and that the keyboard shortcut you chose was not already in use.