In office suites such as MS Office and OnlyOffice there is a shortcut to quickly insert mathematical formulas into text files, presentations, etc. In LibreOffice there's no default shortcut for this, although LO offers a very comprehensive Math editor. Hence, I propose to add "Alt+=" as the default shortcut for the UNO command uno:InsertObjectStarMath for all LO components (Writer, Impress/Draw and Calc). This is the same shortcut used in Microsoft Office and OnlyOffice. The reason for this is that users coming from other office suites expect this shortcut to exist and adding "Alt+=" as the default shortcut to insert Formula objects will lower the gap for new LO users.
Created attachment 170676 [details] Proposed patch I've just attached a proposed patch. For Impress/Draw the command actually is uno:InsertMath, whereas for Writer/Calc the command is uno:InsertObjectStarMath.
Alt+= inserts a SUM in Calc! Don't touch the shortcut please!
(In reply to Roman Kuznetsov from comment #2) > Alt+= inserts a SUM in Calc! Don't touch the shortcut please! Hi Roman! Indeed you're right. I'll not add the shortcut to Calc then. However, when you go to Tools > Customize > Keyboard in Calc, the "Alt+=" shortcut is available (i.e. there's nothing assigned to it). Shouldn't it be showing something there? I tested it in LO 7.1.1.2 and 7.2 alpha and the "Alt+=" shortcut in Calc does add the SUM function, but nothing is showing in the Customize dialog.
How about ctrl+alt+= (haventr check availability). Alt+key is usually a mnemonic rather than a shortcut.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #4) > How about ctrl+alt+= (haventr check availability). Alt+key is usually a > mnemonic rather than a shortcut. I think this is a good idea, because it also solves the issue raised by Roman. I'll push the proposed patch to Gerrit using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+= BTW, the shortcut is available in all components because it wasn't even being listed as a possible shortcut, so I added it to acccfg.cxx
Minor issue is that non-English keyboards require modifier key to access the equal sign. On the German layout it's shift+0. But this is another topic (and could be handled also by the localizing people with a lang= setting).
Rafael Lima committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/7b7d280912f90149ba5512c13b9132cf524974e4 tdf#141202 Set "Ctrl+Alt+=" as the default shortcut to insert Math objects It will be available in 7.2.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Using Ctrl+Alt shortcuts should be avoided due to Windows using it as key combination components itself, which prevents the shortcuts from working on certain keyboard layouts, eg. this particular one on French, as can be seen in bug 150682.