For those of you reading the above comment, it has been quite obvious, and stated in every email or comment in which we are asked, that no new posts are making it to the site.

However, every email, and every comment has been replied to, as the date on every email and every comment shows, we are quite active on keeping up to date on anything that concerns the site as it stands.

However, no new posts have been made, as I have not had time to write any new posts, given my current work schedule. But we do certainly appreciate your support!

You can take it very far, having it act on a selection, copy it, change it, paste it, move on to some other chunk of text, take your changed result, and replace your original result. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, it is an application switcher, multiple clipboard hander, as well as a multi purpose action recorder. Anything you do in repetition, this application will help you with.

That little plug for a great app aside, and keep in mind, they are coming out shortly with version 4, which I am not sure at what liberties I am allowed to speak of, but any 3.5 purchase today will get you version 4 for free when it is released.

At any rate, I have this feeling that you may have a working keyboard shortcut, and you just need to quit the app you want it to work in. Also, keep in mind, not all apps work with the floating dictionary. Use something like TextEdit, which we know works, as your testing ground. Make sure you quit the app and then test, and make sure you are applying the shortcut to all apps, and not just a specific one. For good measure, close out the System Pref Pane as well; though I computer restart certainly should not be needed.

I currently do not have Snow as a easy means to test, sorry for that.

I have used keyboard Maestro to work a little different with the dictionary, in that sometimes I type a word that I do not know what means, and can spawn a lookup of that word after the fact.

Take for example the word circumlocution, I did that all with no mouse!

Video of Keyboard Maestro Macro I made, in working use.
(Well, sort of, I had to use the mouse since I was in video recording.)

You very well could have ran into a bug. It may be worth it to just force the muscle memory aside, and learn the built in keyboard commands for the floating dictionary

On the keyboard shortcut issues. I would first make sure you have applied all the current system updates. I believe there are two significant update to Snow Leopard now. I know there was certainly a good deal of bugs with regard to keyboard shortcuts in early pre-release versions of Snow.

Second, I would try to assign the key as a non F key. It could be that F1, depending on your machine is a little more hard wired to something else. For example, on the laptop on which I type this, F1 controls brightness, and I find some apps allow that as a key that can be overridden, and others do not.

Perhaps try a different function, one that is more simple, or defining your own. So try editing the “Show Help Menu” to something else, this way we can see if it is limited to just the lookup in dictionary, or if it is a problem with the entire preference area.

I have this feeling F1 may just be off limits, or you may have to find the conflict and resolve it first. This seems logical as to why you can not even edit the field, it is essentially “in use”.

Here’s my question. I just installed snow leopard and the command-control-D works, but I had it set up in leopard so I just had to hit F1 to activate it, but I can’t figure out how to change it. When I try to edit the keyboard shortcut “look up in dictionary” it doens’t work. It just won’t let me edit the input. any ideas?

I’ll give you credit and send some link love your way.

Thanks once again for all your time!

My next suggestion to you, and a very simple way to troubleshoot, is to see if this is a local user account preference issue. Go into System Preferences, and into Accounts, and make a new account. Log out of your primary account, and login to your newly created, never used account.

See if the command works in that account, if it does, we have now narrowed it down to a preference issue, and we should be able to locate which one it is, delete it, and let the system create it new and clean.

If it is not, you will need to add it, or change the shortcut to that. There is a chance, you have some other app that is taking over that shortcut, and that is why it is not working.

You may want to try deleting it from the listing in Keyboard Shortcuts, or, as long as you are ok with this, you can “Restore Defaults”.

Also, remember, this does not work in all Applications, so test in one you know it will work in, such as Safari.