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.