Mapping hotkeys - a hint please...

Support Basics & Interface
1

Something that’s always defeated me in 2.5/6 is the hotkey ‘editor’.

I tried again today to remap a key (in 2.63 64-bit Windoze) and failed. Maybe someone can help me out?

I was weight painting and wanted to map the ‘F’ key back to the ‘Face Select’ mode toggle.
By default ‘F’ appears to be mapped to a function for changing brush size. (I don’t do that nearly
so often as switching in and out of face select - to make the verts/edges visible).

OK. So I open up the User Preferences Input panel and find the 3D-View/weight paint panel and the current
‘F’ key mapping. Seems to be “Radial Control” - Makes sense. Apparently mapped to shift-F also.

Next problem is, what is the Python operator? If I wave over the face select mode button, I get a hint that
it’s ‘Mesh.use_paint_mask’. So I type that in the ‘operator’ box in the hot-key.

The input box refuses the uppercase ‘M’ and presents me with ‘mesh.use_paint_mask’. The ‘title’ of
the hot key changes to ‘MESH_OT_use_paint_mask’, which I took as a hopeful sign that it at least
recognised the name, but possibly, in fact, meant the opposite…

But back in the 3D-view, while the ‘F’ key no longer brings up the brush size control, it has no effect
on the face select mode toggle.

OK. So I rummaged in the Python API reference pages (By now, you’ve guessed that Python is a
mystery to me, but I really wanted to fix that key!) I spotted that msg.set_paint_mask was in fact
a boolean variable. Then I rummaged further looking for a way to toogle a boolean, and found:

bpy.ops.wm.context_set_boolean(data_path="", value=True)

Ah ha! I thought. I just need to use something like:

bpy.ops.wm.context_set_boolean(“Mesh.use_paint_mask”, !Mesh.use_paint_mask)

But truly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Blender promptly crashed.

I picked blender up and dusted it off, then looked up a Python language reference and
boolean operators. Okay. It’s not ‘!’, it’s ‘not’.

Right. So this time I paste in:

bpy.ops.wm.context_set_boolean(“Mesh.use_paint_mask”, not Mesh.use_paint_mask)

Poof! Another invitation to debug blender (yep I have a debugger installed).

Can someone give me hint here? What’s the ‘right’ way to toggle this switch?
Does changing hotkeys really need a knowledge of Python and the Blender API?

Thanks in advance.

Ross.

2

Hi,
There already is a hotkey for that, it’s “M”. so if you want to change it, go back into the user preferences and it’s a Contex Toggle right below the Radial Controls you mentioned in your post. All you need to do then is change it to whatever you want.

3

Thanks rickgski.

In fact ‘M’ just brings up the ‘change bone layers’ popup.

But by copying and pasting the shortcut entries from ‘M’ back to the ‘F’ key I get a functional hotkey
to toggle the face select mode.

Ross.

4

Sorry, in my version M in weight paint mode does change the face selection not bone layers, but glad you got it worked out.