How can I set keyboard shortcuts for the left hand side buttons (comb, smooth, length etc.) in particle mode (for hair editing)? I mean what commands must I enter in the binding?
More generally, is there some proper built in method or add-on for finding out these commands? Some old tutorial suggests reading the tooltips, but that doesn’t seem to work anymore or works very differently. This seems to be fairly common problem among users.
i think it’s the n key
N opens the right side panel and t the left side, but that’s not what I mean. I want to bind keys to the buttons that are on those panels. Preferably sliders and checkboxes too.
F - change radius
shift+F - change size
That’s it. Hair stuff is still FUBAR IMO.
In Vertex/Texture/Weightpaint:
1-0, shift+(1-0) stets the brush
In Sculptmode additionally:
D,S,P,I,G,L,Shift+T,C,Shift+C,M select brushes. You got to stepdance with your fingers 
But there’s nothing for the HairEdit.
Although the menu is labeled Brush, it seems those are not brushes per se, but handled as operators.
Lot’s of randomness
Ow, I hadn’t noticed the radius and strength hotkeys. That’s certainly helpful. Thanks. But the issue of brush changing still remains. It’s really awkward to keep reaching to the far left every time I want to change the brush, which is very often.
Is there a macro recorder of any kind in blender? Back when ZBrush could not bind hotkeys to brushes, I made bunch of macros that only select single brush and then bound keys to those. A bit cumbersome, but functional.
Well I figure it out with some effort. It’s nice that blender has definable shortcuts these days but this is a bit strange design.
To bind the comb tool you would set the first field to:
wm.context_set_value
Context attrib to:
tool_settings.particle_edit.tool
and value to:
‘COMB’
Other possible values are
‘NONE’, ‘COMB’, ‘SMOOTH’, ‘ADD’, ‘LENGTH’, ‘PUFF’, ‘CUT’, ‘WEIGHT’
It’s all there in the python api docs, but only if you know where to look. I actually found it first by searching the blender source code. Not exactly nice for end user.