# How to add a keyboard shortcut to open a Palette

I would like to add a hotkey or keyboard shortcut to open a Mathematica Palettte, like e.g. the Basic Math Assistant. I found a number of questions like this one or this one with answers suggesting to make changes to the KeyEventTranslations.tr file. But I could not figure out how to apply these ideas to make a shortcut for a general menu command.

The path of the file KeyEventTranslations.tr can be found with the following command

FileNameJoin[{$$InstallationDirectory, "SystemFiles/FrontEnd/TextResources",$$OperatingSystem}]


For example, on Windows, the file location would be like

"C:\Program Files\Wolfram Research\Mathematica\12.2\SystemFiles\FrontEnd\TextResources\Windows"

(* Palettes *)
Item[KeyEvent["x", Modifiers -> {Control, Shift}],
FrontEndExecute[{
FrontEndFrontEndToken[

Adding the code above into KeyEventTranslations.tr, restart Mathematica, then you can use Control+Shift+x to open BasicMathAssistant.
Here you can find out all the FrontEndToken that we can use.
• As I understand it, FrontEndTokenExecute should save a few keystrokes by combining FrontEndExecute[FrontEndToken[“name”]]. Jan 17 at 22:43
• Right. Maybe that time I just wanted to keep consistent with the original KeyEventTranslations.tr` file. Jan 17 at 22:51