Thanks folks.
broken: Indeed this is for the book. I’m prejudiced against the manipulators and I know it, so I thought I’d solicit the opinions of others.
Manipulators? Totally forgot about those things. I turned mine off and did Ctrl-U and that was the end of that. I never use them.
Lately my thumb’s been kind of hurting so I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with my tablet and stylus that I would normally do with a mouse. When I started doing that more I kind of rediscovered the mouse gestures. I can minimize how much I need to use the keyboard with those, and it’s kind of nice to be able to sit back with my tablet on my lap and do work like that. I have to admit I’m not very fast at that right now, and I often have to right click out of an unintentional grab, but I can see a use for those.
(how do I delete a post in this new system? could I ever do it before?)
Always just used hotkeys, been using them since I started. Must say I really never found a use for manipulators, but since I just turned them off and saved my preferences that way, they don’t bother me. I would imagine for newbies they might be helpful.
I use them almost all the time, especially for broad structural modelling. Why press G-Z when I can just grab an up-arrow and drag?
I especially use the rotation widget, set to Normal, for rotating bones. It saved my sanity. I can have the view or the model rotated to any angle and I don’t have to think X, Y, Z to move a bone - I just grab the rotator that’s aligned the way I want to rotate it.
I haven’t thought deeply about when or why I use it but I only turn it off when it gets in the way. I’ve tried gestures a couple of times but find the response time too slow to be practical.
As I said in my post on menu items, I don’t believe these things to be newbie items - they are just alternatives. Some people are right-brained (engineers, coders) and probably thrive on shortcut keys. Others are left-brained (Artists!!!) and thrive on visual clues and may not give a damn if there’s a “quicker” way. I’m a left-brained (and left-handed) artist so I tend to use whichever I happen to use at the time.
Different strokes for different folks. Not every user has to be a power user. Telling people they must use short cuts is a bit like telling aspiring painters they must paint oils on Belgian linen. I feel a book on Blender Basics should offer all alternatives to the reader and can suggest that certain ways can be more efficient but to label some alternatives “good” and others “bad” doesn’t send a positive message (about the user or the software) - imho 
I habitually use the manipulator widgets on cameras. I have both the grab and rotate widgets set in Local mode. It makes it easier for me to position the blasted thing to get the view I want.
I use the rotation/normal for bones too. Although after only recently finding out about the “r-r” / free rotation shortcut, I’ll sometimes use that as well.
I agree about the “power user” comment too. I do use a fair number of hotkeys though, but only because it’s for operations that I use frequently. Having the menus / tooltips is very handy, actually really a necessity for less often used operations.
Mike
Gee, I would never have guessed that from the title of this thread 
Mike
Ctrl+Space & Alt+Space is new to me. Great, thanks!
I don’t mind manipulators, and use them even though I’m not a 3D newbie. Subconciously, I guess, rather than actively thinking about hitting multiple key-combos.
I would prefer that the rotate-manipulator appears when I hit ‘r’ and the scale-manipulator when ‘s’ is pressed and so on, but since manipulators are relatively new in Blender, I can understand why this isn’t the case. I use the shortcuts also (GX, RY, etc.) but as I said, I find myself thinking about it for half a second every time and make sure I hit the right keys, which makes the workflow not as fluent as I’d like. Pressing Ctrl+Space, select option and then manipulate does not speed this up drastically, but at least it’s more visual which, as an artist, is good!
Actually, I’m not prejudiced against them – I just haven’t done enough non-coding work, non-BlenderPeople work since they were added to get to know them. And the thread title was to encourage the strong expression of opinion, and to be a little amusing.
It’s working – these are all good perspectives and just what I was looking to learn.
I think I lied. I do sometimes turn them on to show axes, because it’s a little handier than “draw axes”. I rarely use them to manipulate, though.
For me it’s about not having to hold any keys or keep buttons pressed while doing so. If I have to move lots of objects then my mousing hand gets next to no strain by using the hotkeys. I also feel I have more control over positioning when not having to simultaneously hold a button down. When I use the manipulators, I always seem to have to correct what I’ve done multiple times.
I use a combination of hotkeys and the Rotation and Transformation manipulators - I especially like the manipulators in Armature Pose Mode.
I can get used to them.
Sometimes I look for specific tutorials to get trained in using them.
Besides, I could not tell which kind of problems they would solve more efficiently than traditional mesh editing. Therefore, I have got a basic knowledge about them.
I wish we had a good tutorial about them, the use cases type, with comparisons with traditional mesh editing.
Alvarus.
I use both. Generally I use GRS when using a multipaned view layout. Sometimes I have to switch to full screen 3d view to do some vertex pushing and then the manipulator comes in very handy. It just cuts down the number of key presses.
Whats annoying though is the selection hitbox when the manipulator is in view. It’s pretty difficult to pick some vertices when they are close together and the manipulator is on. A handy tool though.
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I usually use G/S/R for modelling, as most of the time I model in ortho view, so no need to fiddle with the axii (or is it “axes”?). They do come in handy in perspective mode - esp. extremely zommed in to fix some fine detail - when I loose my bearings on where the global axii are.
Oh yeah, and the rotation widgets for posing bones: indispensable.
The scale widgets I don’t use much.
Anyways, good thing to have them in there as an option.
I think they are helpful …
some points to support it:
- they are more intuitive
- They help to model more acurately (its just that thing egronomics maybe, but draging a vertex is more realistic than hiting a key and moving mouse in the air. (not that I cant do without it
) - in some cases efficient (speed)
- evidence is the amount of good mesh models that we are seeing currently.
- although it also needs a “max-like” oh I should use that word carefully, 2D translation (locking one axis)
cheers
Man… It never ocurred to me that the manipulator can be turned off or changed from the default ‘Translate’! Stellar! Now I’ve got to play with rotate and scale
I use the translate manipulator sometimes, but sometimes it gets in the way. Most of the time I use g/r/s anyway. I do love hotkeys (my favorite text editor if vi). I can do almost anything faster with the keyboard than the mouse. In the same vein, I hate mouse gestures… is there a way to turn them off?
I rarely give any use to the translate/scale manipulators. But, like some others, I find that it’s very useful to use the rotate manipulator for rotating bones, especially with Normal orientation and/or when not working in top/side/front view.
I use the widgets when I need to do a G or an S along one single axis. When accuracy is not really important, I just hit G or S;
For S specifically, I think the widget is very useful as it allows one to scale along a single axis. I quite often need to scale along one axis.
As for R, I don’t use the widget. I just get into the right view and hit R. Sometimes I enter a numerical value, though.
I never use the mouse gestures; too unpredictable.
In short: both the hotkeys and the widgets have advantages and disadvantages so I use both, depending on my requirements.