About a week ago, the prolific Marc Edwards tweeted:
Seems like a simple question, but I can’t find an answer: Is there a single shortcut to duplicate an object in Illustrator? Like ⌘J in Ps.
— Marc Edwards (@marcedwards)June 24, 2017
As a frequent Illustrator user, my immediate thought was: “of course there is!” I mean…there has to be, right? What was that key combination again? I better fire up Illustrator and double-check. Hmmm…it really doesn’t exist!? You have to be kidding me.
After confirming Marc’s suspicion with a few quick Google searches, I did what any developer would do and wrote a plug-in. The plug-in adds a Duplicate option to the Edit menu that makes a copy of all selected objects on top of their originals. The clipboard isn’t used, so it won’t be affected. When the Duplicate operation is complete, the originals are deselected and their duplicates are selected.
The default shortcut for Duplicate is ⌥⌘F (Alt+Ctrl+F on Windows), though it can be changed under Edit/Keyboard Shortcuts… within the Menu Commands section. The command is registered for undo and redo operations as Duplicate, and it can be used in Actions.
The plug-in was built using the Adobe Illustrator CC 2017 SDK on macOS Sierra and Windows 10 Creators Update. If you’re able to get it working on older OS versions, feel free to leave a comment for other users, but otherwise, I have no intention of backporting it.
(note updated versions at end of post) After downloading Duplicate_1.0.1.zip (79 KB), extract the appropriate Duplicate.aip version to your Illustrator plug-ins folder. This is usually something like /Applications/Adobe Illustrator CC 2017/Plug-ins on Mac and C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CC 2017\Plug-ins on Windows.
Then, start Illustrator and have fun duplicating.
Update on 12-25-2019: Version 1.1 is compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2020 (24.0): Duplicate_1.1.zip (75 KB)
Update on 5-3-2021: Version 1.2 is compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2021 (25.0): Duplicate_1.2.zip (49 KB)
Update on 2-8-2022: Version 1.2 (above) is also compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2022 (26.0).
Update on 4-21-2022: Version 1.3 is compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2022 (26.0) and adds Apple silicon and Intel processor support: Duplicate_1.3.zip (88 KB)
Update on 6-4-2022: Version 1.4 is more compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2022 (26.0) and includes Apple silicon and Intel processor support: Duplicate_1.4.zip (88 KB)
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