I am on the same wavelength. I was the guy who said that under certain circumstances, people may prefer to use keys when people starting to claim that one was faster than the other.
I am not using them a lot. So, I don’t really get what I should expect more than handles for planes and axis from such gizmos.
I can understand a new paradigm like Scale cage. But for Rotate or Move, what do you expect ?
Like I explained above: extrude, slide, even duplicate (pretty much Max/Maya-esque). Ability to activate an axis or plane and transform on it regardless if the gizmo is in view. If we were to feel really fancy, I’d also vote for Maya-style custom pivots and orientations, which are always two/three clicks away and don’t require you to mess up your selection or any other settings. The new 3D cursor is almost it, actually, if only there was a convenient way to set its orientation; right now it’s a bit of a mess.
OK. I get it. That goes further than a specific gizmo design.
It implies to rethink initial idea of one gizmo for one operator.
That means creating more exceptions like Transform active tool (one gizmo to rule several operations).
Searching the path of efficiency after William started on the path of discoverability.
I stick to the active tool. That way, I can use snapping options.
It is also possible to use keymap of active tool to temporary remap keys for objects transformations to 3DCursor transformations.
Blender already has enough precedent. For one, you can have multiple gizmos active at the same time (or the actual Transform tool). For two, macros like duplicate+move. Possible with hotkeys, simply not possible with gizmos.
Like I said, it’s almost there, it’s just too convoluted. Like, what’s required to snap it to a vertex but align to an edge:
Compare to:
Like, in Blender, the functionality is there, just not the UI. That particular case touches too many different things, and has you actually change too many different settings, which, by the way, you might otherwise prefer to be set differently (i.e. after such operation you’ll also have to reset them).
And you can’t really remap keys for modal map. It uses the Transform modal map. Which if you change, you change globally. Unless I misunderstand your meaning.
Blender’s keymap config is full of mode and submodes.
You can use same key to do different operations into different editors.
Inside same editor, same shortcut can be used for different operations in different modes.
And inside same mode, same shortcut can be used for different operations according to different active tools.
Transform Cursor is an option of Move and Rotate operators. When it is enabled, use of modal keymap of these operators does not make a switch to selection editing.
So what I mean is that you can assign G,R to 3D Cursor movement and rotation when 3D cursor is active tool.
That means that to be able to move or rotate something else, you will have to change to another active tool for that.
Ah, ok, yes, thanks for the reminder. Hmm… with that in mind, it could be possible to achieve at least some of the snapping/alignment automation, with a few custom operators. Thanks.