Lately I've found myself churning through a lot more SW files than I have the last couple of years, and it seems like I have to hit the "Esc" key a lot more than my muscle memory remembers. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and it seems like something has changed in the last release or so such that some field in the Property Manager gets the keyboard focus upon selection. For example, as soon as I click to place the endpoint of a line, the cursor goes to the property manager "length" field. I have never, ever, ever in over 15 years ever wanted to type the length of a line into the property manager page. I want to add a dimension. So I hit my Dimension shortcut key (spacebar) and nothing happens because the typing cursor was in the Property Manager text field.
I have also found myself somehow adding a view arrow and label to drawing views due to the same sort of interaction, although I haven't taken the time yet to figure out exactly which sequence I do without thinking that now creates a view arrow and label instead of the dimensions I want.
If I want to type into the dang property manager page, I'll click over there in the spot where I want to type. SW shouldn't guess (wrong) what I want to do and make me hit escape so many times. It also kills performance since the PMP has to go away and then reload so much instead of just staying there and not interfering with my shortcut keys.
Josh,
You did not mention what version you are currently using and what was the previous version you were using. I did some tests and starting with SW2016 the spacebar was no longer treated as a shortcut key if you have something assigned to it. As Jim mentioned other shortcut keys that cannot be interpreted as valid input for the first keypress are still treated as shortcut keys. My recommendation would be to change your shortcut to alt-spacebar since the alt key is normally close to the space bar (and is still basically the same as you are use to). Another option (if you always enter a dimension) would be to turn on "Enable on screen numeric input on entity creation"