I’ve been learning Blender on and off lately, and one thing I learned early on is that shortcut keys are super important in Blender. It has been difficult to memorize the ton of shortcuts without looking at user made cheat-sheets and keyboard layouts. But most of them are never up to date with the latest version so I usually have to resort searching community forum posts.
Last weekend I was messing around with python in Blender and I saw that it was possible to access all the keyconfig data. I exported all the data to JSON and had fun making a html keyboard that had all the shortcuts on it. It even updates live with modifier key presses on the keyboard. Yay!
It’s a lot easier to keep up to date with the latest Blender because of the awesome data-driven-ness of it.
Depending on community response, I’m thinking of adding things like: search functionality, export custom key configs, upload code to Github and release it as a add-on for Blender.
A lot of the shortcut names are pretty meaningless taking the info you have from the keyconfig data
For example in the 3d view the shortcut for:
Z = ‘Context Toggle Values’. This doesn’t tell anyone that it actually toggles between wireframe and solid viewport shading
And the shortcut for:
O = ‘Context Toggle’. It actually toggles on/off proportional editing
Also things like:
W = call menu. What menu does it call ?
U = call menu. What menu does it call ?
Ctrl+L = call menu. What menu does it call ?
Shift+S = call menu. What menu does it call ?
You’ll have the same thing throughout all the shortcuts as there are tons and tons of call menus and other meaningless phrases that don’t tell you what the shortcut actually does, something pretty critical for a keyboard map.
That’s a fair point, but it I think it still works well for most of the keys. The nice thing about this is that it gives you a visual overview of available actions. Even though a name is not very descriptive, a true explorer will press the button anyway to find out what it does.
And it’s still better than the alternative: having nothing
It’s the data source, Blender uses helper operators to achieve certain things, what they actually do is hidden in the operator options. These options vary, but they are readable just like the keyboard maps.
Very useful tool as far as am concern. I Just learned about short cuts i didn’t know existed. I love the way everything is laid out.
Nice work. There should be a button located next to the blender menu tool bar that says “shortcuts”. When you click on it, it opens up a hovering window showing all the short cuts exactly the way you have it laid out. You should consider porting what you have into blender as a add on.
This sounds very similar to the way softimage handled it. It would show you free keys in white, used keys in green and conflicts in red. When there was a conflict, it would also allow you to directly reassign the conflicting key to a new hotkey or to disable it instead of looking for it like in 3ds. To assign keys you had the option to click on the free keys in the gui or to use keyboard input. Also had different layers for modifier keys, which in blender I think any key can be a modifier more or less.
