Why is this grey?

[boonman]

Just curious...

[Robert2]

Because “Play-at-Speed” on its own is not a command to which you can assign a hot key…

[boonman]

oh...

so why is it there?

[Robert2]

Because you searched for “Play-at-Speed” as a command…

[boonman]

So every command appears in the Keyboard Shortcut interface, even if it is actually not possible to make this command into a keyboard shortcut?

why is it there?


> . <

[Robert2]

It is a way to tell you that “Pay-at-Speed” is not available as a standalone command. Sometimes we have to use our brains…

[boonman]

hnmm
there must be some programming decision i'm not understanding.

Well, as a feature request, if a command exists in the shortcut editor, yet, it is not allowed to actually receive a shortcut, it'd be nice to show a message to the user:

"Despite the presence of this command in the Keyboard Shortcut Editor, you cannot actually assign a Keyboard Shortcut to it."

[steve]

there must be some programming decision i'm not understanding.

The command list is not hard-coded into the keyboard preferences, but is generated on demand from the "Command Manager". The Command Manager maintains a list of all commands, including menu items that do nothing except for holding sub-menus (such as "Tracks menu > Add New", and "Extra menu > Play at Speed").

When you view the key bindings by name, without using the "Search" filter, the list of commands is filtered by the default filter, which removes the "do nothing" items.
When you view the key bindings by name and use the "Search" filter, the search filter replaces the default filter and displays all commands that match the specified search text. This includes the "do nothing" commands if they match the specified search text. Examples of this are:
Play-at-Speed - Play-at-Speed
and
Add New - Add New

"Despite the presence of this command in the Keyboard Shortcut Editor, you cannot actually assign a Keyboard Shortcut to it."

Isn't that superfluous? You can see that "you cannot actually assign a Keyboard Shortcut to it" because it is greyed out.

[boonman]

>> "Isn't that superfluous? You can see that "you cannot actually assign a Keyboard Shortcut to it" because it is greyed out."

the problem is that, because it was disabled, I assumed there was an app conflict with a global keyboard shortcut hook--perhaps instigated by AutoHotKey or some other app on my PC.

So I assumed that the only reason why an Audacity function would be in the Shortcut Editor AND be Disabled, was because of some external conflict.

Some apps will notify you of a "global keyboard shortcut conflict" in this fashion.

[steve]

Audacity does not currently use global keyboard shortcuts, and isn't aware of global shortcuts used in other applications, though the developers have tried to avoid using global shortcuts belonging to the operating system (such as not using Command+M on macOS, as that is the standard shorcut for minimising a window).

I agree that it's a bit surprising that these "do nothing" commands appear. My guess is that they need to be available for the Scripting API (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/scripting.html), though I've not found any documentation about them. If I can find out the reason, I'll post the info here.