After about 2 months using Blender, I decided to change all the key binding because the default one make no sense to me.
Thing is, all other menus that are not the 3D view are dodging the mouse rebinding. For instance, in the UV editor, clicking away from a face will not deselect it but instead select the closest UV face. Doing a drag selection doesn’t work (I’m forced to use this stupid B box thing). Once multiple faces are selected, dragging them will only move ONE face, and deselect all the rest.
The same thing apply to the Node Editor where the drag and drop is a nightmare.
Why is Blender so non-intuitive ? This is insane, and probably cost it a lot of reputation. I have a friend that left Blender to C4D for this reason. I spent 2H rebinding everything so I can have a proper and logical binding.
Any tips on those side menus ? I really want the mouse to be intuitive in those menus and not having to box select and press any key to do what all softwares in the world can do with the mouse only !
Thanks for your answer, but I got this part working already. Maybe I didn’t explain myself correctly.
Right now, I can click and drag select, but I cannot drag the nodes (or UV) themselves. Let’s say you are on Windows, or any softwares in the entire world, and you select multiple things (like folders or files). Then you hold click and you move your cursor. What you expect is that everything you have selected will be drag and drop on release, right ? Not on Blender. Because at Blender Corp, logic is not part of the process.
Right now, I need to press “G” (I guess they chose “G” for “Translate” Or “Move” or “Displace” right ? Oh, well…) to move a whole bunch of nodes, and if I click away from any node, that doesn’t deselect them, I need to use CTRL+A to deselect all. WHY ? Is the guy who made the key binding on acid on a daily basis ?
All those manipulations should be done with mouse only. Any other key is overkill and slowing down the users. I can’t see why Blender need to be so complicated for such easy tasks.
In the node editor (by default), you can drag all the selected nodes by LMB dragging in an empty area (I guess the logic behind it is that if you click directly on a node, it means you want to move that node rather than the entire selection). But I also don’t find it very handy and we already have right-click for selecting.
If you want to move all selected nodes even when you click directly on a node, go in the user prefs > Input > Node Editor > Node Editor (Global) and simply uncheck the first entry (Select - Mouse - Action Mouse). Side note : you can see in the entry right below the same action but with “Select Mouse” this time, which shows that both LMB and RMB do the same (not very useful I think).
Now you have right click for selecting and left click for grabbing (btw “G” is for Grab, not very intuitive but tell me about Maya’s W, R and E). You can however still Shift+LMB to select.
For the UV editor, in Input > Image > UV Editor :
add a modifier (like Shift) to “Set 2D cursor - Mouse - Action Mouse” (or simply uncheck it)
add a new entry with the “Add New” button
expand it and put “transform.translate” in the text field (copied from the “Translate - keyboard - G” entry)
Bind it to Left Mouse
This is all assuming you’re using the default Right click select mode. Tell me if that’s not your case.
Now for deselecting when clicking away, I don’t know if there’s a clean way to have this. You would probably have to bind Left Click to the “(De)select All” action, which means it would also select everything when nothing is selected, which is not very good.
However I find the A shortcut (not Ctrl+A) good enough, as I don’t need to look at the keyboard to find the button.
Finally, don’t be mean to the developers. The mouse-keyboard interaction is generally not bad (apart from a few examples) and allows for a quite efficient workflow once you accept its differences from the other programs. And anyway that was quite mean to say someone seems to be “on acid on a daily basis”
My RMB and LMB are reversed from Blender default, because, here again, left clicking is used to select everywhere, in any OS and software, so why Blender as to make it the cursor ? (I head it will be removed, btw).
I’m not being mean, I really think there is a huge issue with the interface and the workflow in Blender. I’m not alone saying that, and that’s crippling this good software from having more commercial/“professional” uses. Well, ok, that was not the best way to say that.
I just realized thanks to your post that I can move a bunch of nodes using right click. This is still silly but better than using the keyboard. For deselecting, I have the feeling that there is no other choice than using the keyboard.
If you use left click select, for the node editor, uncheck either the first entry or the second entry (under Node Editor) wether you want to be able to move multiple nodes by clicking with LMB or RMB.
For the UV editor, do the same steps as explained previously except you bind it to Right mouse instead. You don’t want to bind it to Left because that’s what you select with and you can’t have both actions with the same click.
I’m a pro-left-click select myself but I don’t consider right click so bad. Sebastian König has good arguments for example :
Maybe I’ll do a video about all the counter arguments I have some day, there doesn’t seem to be any.
Gnougnou, have you come across/tried my Custom Blender Setup?
I think it has some of the things you are looking for. Maybe you can use it to reverse engineer and integrate anything you like into your own setup.
Anyway give it a go, it’s also very well documented. The video is fairly outdated now, there’s been a lot of tweaks and improvements since.
Also I didn’t mention that you can Box select with a simple click and drag without having to press B in the node editor (and without having to change any setting)
