MacOS – Microsoft Outlook does not properly handle redefined “Paste” keyboard shortcut

keyboardmacosms office

I've been a windows user for a long time, and I hate the ⌘ shortcuts for stuff. Since I only use my Mac for work stuff, I figured I'd just redefine the App Shortcuts from the keyboard menu so I could use control+C, control+V, etc.

This works fine in almost every app I've tried, except Microsoft Outlook. There control+C works, but control+V does not. I can copy selected text just fine, but Paste exhibits some weird behavior.

Hitting control+V causes the cursor to jump several lines down and scroll the e-mail. I can continue hitting control+V until the cursor reaches the very end of the e-mail, at which point I can now paste again. The entire time, the menu shows the correct shortcut:

Outlook Edit Menu

The Edit menu does not flash (and no other menu flashes either) signaling that a keyboard shortcut in that menu has been pressed until the cursor is at the very end of the document.

And I have everything set up correctly in keyboard settings:
keyboard settings

Unsurprisingly, ⌘+V also doesn't work because that's not a valid shortcut anymore.

Has anybody found a solution for this issue?

Edit: Turns out it's not just Outlook that has this issue. Several OSX applications will view CTRL+V as a "scroll down" operation.

Best Answer

Here's what worked for me:

Create DefaultKeyBinding.dict under ~/Library/KeyBindings (Create KeyBindings folder if it doesn't exists) Then paste the contents below into that file:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
          <key>^v</key>
          <string>noop:</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>

Alternately, you can use the following, non-XML syntax (this is the entire contents of the file, and any other keybindings would go inside the curly braces):

{
    "^v" = noop:;
}

Restart Outlook, and all other affected programs, and ctrl + v should no longer scroll down.

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