The Smart Keyboard Folio of my iPad doesn’t have a physical Esc key. However, in the Portuguese layout, there’s a key to the left of the “1” key that has no use to me within Dorico. However, any shortcut that I apply to UI>Esc doesn’t work. It only actually works with the system-wide Esc key, which doesn’t exist by default.
The only workaround is to assign the Esc key to another modifier key system wide, like the Caps Lock or the Globe key.
I find that setting another key to the UI > Escape command does work as expected, but it’s important to realise that the Esc key has several purposes in Dorico. For example, if the caret is shown and you hit Esc, it’s actually the Note Input > Stop Note Input command that is executed. And when you are in a dialog and you hit Esc, that isn’t triggering a command in Dorico at all, but rather it’s being handled by the dialog itself, and you cannot specify a key command to cancel a dialog in that way.
I enter and edit using the keyboard and only occasionally need to show the Left Zone, and then only for a moment. I wanted to assign the Esc key to show/hide that zone, i.e. Command-7. But having Esc as UI > Escape is convenient too. I used a third-party utility, Keyboard Maestro (I’m not affiliated) to assign Esc to show/hide only when the title of the focused window (the one in front in the active app) contains “Flow”. When the focused window is anything else, as in a dialog, Keyboard Maestro does nothing, so Esc does UI > Escape. As another post indicated, Karabiner Elements would probably work just as well.
With this modification, Esc still dismisses popovers but also shows or hides the left zone. The Return or Enter key also dismisses a popover or stops note input if active. Curiously, Return completes the popover action, e.g. setting a key signature, but so does Esc! I would have thought that Esc would dismiss the popover without completing the action, but it’s easy enough to delete whatever you’ve entered in the popover and then press Return or Esc to dismiss it without effecting any change.