Hotkeys are turning on and off by itself

[Anonymous]

I'm a beginner in Maya and using an education version. 

I frequently use very basic hotkeys such as Move tool(w), Rotate tool(e), Scale tool(r), Soft select(b).

For some odd reason, those keys just stops working in the middle of my work even though I've been using those keys just fine until a minute ago. 

It's very frustrating because after some time, those hotkeys start working again. I don't know what I did to disable those keys in the first place and how I abled it again.

Does anybody know why this is happening?

Thank you in advance!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Is there any way to reproduce this or is it just happening completely randomly?

Have you tried deleting your settings/preferences?

If you could possibly find some steps to reproduce this or video of the issue it would be much easier to try and figure out what's going on.

[Lindsey_Robbins]

So, this is a really simple solution, but it's something I ran into a lot when I first started.

If you've just been using a slider, or typing in a number somewhere, sometimes the cursor is still active in a box somewhere, and your regular tool hotkeys are just typing those letters into the box. 

Try hitting enter if it happens again, that often 'locks' the text input and drops you back into 'normal' hotkey mode.

... this happens a lot in games, too, where someone will be chatting, and then suddenly their chat is spamming hotkeys and then they die, because their character did nothing while being attacked. Pretty dang funny, actually.

[Anonymous]

 Hi @sean.heasley,

I've been trying to find out what's causing it but I couldn't -- meaning I don't know how to reproduce it. And I haven't tried resetting my preferences. I will do that now and see if I come across this problem, again.

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Lindsey_Robbins,

I've been changing numbers on Channel Box a lot so that might be the issue. The thing is, if I remember correctly, this happened while I was only using Move/Rotate/Scale Tool. 

Thank you for the suggestion and I'll definitely try it. I hope that solves this frustrating issue. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

So, I found out what was causing this issue. I had another language installed other than English and whenever the other language is selected, hotkeys don't work. This happens because I work on my project while sending text messages and Googling on my Mac in both languages. I just have to make sure English is selected while working on Maya. 

This isn't an issue on any of Adobe softwares.