Saving and Restoring Your Keyboard Shortcuts in Manga Studio 5 and 5EX

Creating custom keyboard shortcuts for Manga Studio 5 and 5EX takes time and effort. When you have your settings just right, the last thing you want is to lose them forever. But you may not know where these settings are stored, or what to do if your installation of Manga Studio stops working properly. If this is a valid concern for you, read on…

On the Mac version of Manga Studio, settings are stored inside your Users > “Name” > Documents > Smith Micro > Manga Studio5_0_0 folder. On Windows, look inside \Documents\Smith Micro\Manga Studio5_0_0.) The Manga Studio5_0_0 folder is where Manga Studio’s user modified settings (keyboard shortcuts, workspace, etc.) are stored.

If you’ve made any custom keyboard shortcuts in Manga Studio 5, you can find them in a file called default.khc, which is located inside the Shortcut folder. As far as I know, this file is common to both Mac and Windows versions of Manga Studio – although the location of this file will be different on Windows.

Copy over the default.khc file to another safe location should you want to restore your shortcut settings at a later date. I keep a backup of default.khc on a separate hard drive volume, in the unlikely event that my main drive dies (or gets corrupt).

If you ever have to reinstall Manga Studio 5, place your backup copy of default.khc inside your Shortcut folder and your custom keyboard shortcuts will be restored.

In my next post, I will share my methodology of backing up my custom Manga Studio brushes and custom Auto Actions (scripts within Manga Studio).

-Krishna