With the release of Final Cut Pro 10.3, Apple introduced many new powerful features. One of the new features I love the most is the ability to customize the user interface. It’s great to be able to hide unwanted panels and get the UI out of the way when you want to focus on a specific task. I found myself creating several custom workspaces for different tasks so I can quickly switch between them. For example I use one workspace for editing and another for color correcting.

However I discovered that there’s no way to assign keyboard shortcuts for these custom workspaces within FCPX. If you look in the Command Editor you won’t find any of your custom workspaces listed.

Luckily there’s a quick and easy way of adding keyboard shortcuts for these custom workspaces using your Mac’s own System Preferences. It only takes 1 minute to setup. Let’s get started.

Custom Workspaces

First of all let’s go ahead and create at least one custom workspace in FCPX. Setup the UI the way you want it. Open up the Window menu, choose Workspaces and select Save Workspace as… Make sure to give it a unique name.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Next open your Mac’s System Preferences and click on the Keyboard preference pane. Select the Shortcuts tab and click on the App Shortcuts in the list on the left hand side. This is where you can add app specific keyboard shortcuts. Click on the Plus sign to create a new keyboard shortcut.

Make sure to select Final Cut Pro as the application in the drop down list then enter the name of your custom workspace in the Menu Title field. Go ahead and enter a Keyboard Shortcut and click Add to save your new shortcut.

Note: It’s probably a good idea to check in FCPX’s Command Editor that the keyboard shortcut you just created isn’t already in use. If it is being used by another command in FCPX you will need to clear the shortcut in order to avoid any conflicts.

As you can see, my new keyboard shortcuts now appear in FCPX!

That’s it! Now you can enjoy quickly switching between your custom workspaces with keyboard shortcuts. This will speed up your editing and make you more efficient. Thanks for reading!