OK, so I’ve been using Blender on and off since it was open sourced but I’ve never really grasped it, I usually use it together with 2d programs for a hybrid look. I’ve still got a lot to learn.
But lately I’ve been feeling very frustrated about the keyboard layout and the “left hand on keyboard, right hand on mouse” philosophy.
I’ve used a Dvorak keyboard for close to twenty years (I’m not about to switch to QWERTY any time soon) and common keys like grab, rotate, scale and undo are on the right hand while control, tab etc are on the left. So there’s no real good way to position the keyboard. I kinda have to use both hands, or move the hand all over.
I want to set it up so that I can still use Dvorak to type in file names, texture names and so on, but to have the modeling shortcut keys be as if it was a QWERTY keyboard. For example, use i to grab, p to rotate, o to scale and so on.
I tried the “Transformer” script posted here a but something went wrong and it messed up my install to the point that I deleted my ~/.config/blender directory and started over. (It’s based on Norwegian Dvorak, maybe that’s the problem?) I also found one made for Macbooks which worked a little bit better, but not great – it also started bugging out after a while and the undo key was weirdly placed. I’d want it to be control-semicolon acually (left hand on keyboard, remember?). The third common solution seems to be that people are running KDE – which I’m not – where you can have different layouts for different programs easily. I’m just running Blender in Xorg with a simple window manager, no full desktop enviroment.
So the plan now is to export Blender’s default keyboard settings and then edit them in Emacs or something. Just that… when I export them, all I get is some boilerplate definitions, no key definitions, whereas if I set Blender’s keyboard settings to be 3dsmax or something, I get a much longer file full of key redefinitions. What am I missing, how can I find Blender’s default settings in a file?
Or, failing that, is there someone using US Dvorak on a normal US Dvorak keyboard that has solved this already?