5.7 FAQ-344 How to add accelerators in Origin?

Last Update: 2/4/2015

Adding accelerators or hotkeys allows you to use a function fast and conveniently. These keyboard shortcuts can be created by you, for any X-function that already has its own menu. To create these, follow the steps below:

  1. Open the origin.ini file, located in your User Files Folder. You can use Notepad to open the file.
  2. Find the section called [WorksheetAccelerators] and/or [GraphAccelerators].
  3. Some accelerators have already been defined such as Ctrl+Y to open the NLFit dialog. You can add to or modify this list. For example to open the FFT dialog that is normally opened from the menu, Analysis:Signal Processing:FFT:FFT, add the following: 3=fft1|Ctrl+B.
  4. Re-save the origin.ini file and re-open Origin. Open the menu, and you will see the shortcut button to the right of the menu.
Notes:
  • The number to the left of the equal sign is the sequence number of the accelerator. The order in the INI is not important, but there can be no gaps, so if you have defined 1,2,3,4 and 5 and you then delete 4, 5 will be ignored.
  • The symbol to the right of the equal sign includes two parts. First is the function name which displays in the dialog (for the example above, you'd see the following in the dialog title: Signal Processing\FFT:fft1) and the second is the shortcut button which you want to use to control the function. You should use a vertical line to divide them.
  • Defining shortcuts here will override standard shortcuts. For example, if you defined subtract_ref|Ctrl+X then you could no longer use Ctrl+X as the cut shortcut. If you defined subtract_ref|Ctrl+Shift+X then you could no longer use Ctrl+Shift+X on a matrix to view the matrix mapping.

Keywords:accelerator, menu, x-function, keyboard, hotkey, shortcut