So, I was wondering… How many of you still use Ctrl+W instead of Ctrl+S to save their work every few seconds?
I feel devoted to the old Ctrl+W because I’ve been a blender-head since the 2.42 days, but some of you youngsters have only used Ctrl+S because that’s the standard hotkey for other apps and it’s the one currently listed next to the save file button. All the same, I’m touched the blender team has continued to support Ctrl+W for old hipsters like me who would have a conniption if they took it away.
It may actually be in part because I have blender mapped to a separate portion of muscle memory. Having diverse hotkeys prevents me from overlapping (which can result in me pressing the wrong keys in different apps), because I do work in maybe 5 different 3D-oriented apps, all with different key layouts.
No matter how good the reason, I just hate having more than one hotkey for one thing. The program is heavily hotkey dependent and they are just not adding any new letters to the alphabet or keys to the keyboard.
So if I was in charge (and be very glad I am not) then I would make saving ctrl-S only so we could use ctrl-W for some other purpose (eventually). Same with deleting with “x” and the “delete” key. We’re not about to use the “delete” key for other uses so I would remove “x” from delete for the default keymap. Anyone who really needs to map things to hotkeys they are not able to unlearn just needs to do so through the preferences.
I’ve always used ctrl w out of habit, and because I rarely use the file menu, I didn’t even realize ctrl s was the new norm. I’ll be remapping ctrl w to something else.
There’s no progress without a willingness to let go of history.
You’re right, Ctrl-S should be dropped and replaced with something useful, like snapping, or entering Sculpt mode for example. There are many functions that start with S, but few that start with W, and W is perfect for Writing your file to disk.
I’ve always used Ctrl+W because it feels so natural to me from my days of programming in Vim where save and quit was the command “w, q” for write to disk, quit. I have Ctrl+S mapped to scale along normals instead because it makes more sense in terms of the rest of the Blender keymap to me.
