Suggestion: Hotkey Based Add Menu

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hey, I just played around with Blender’s hotkeys (randomly hitting buttons :P) and I got this cool idea I would like to suggest (but I don’t know where I’d suggest this)

Recreate the “Add” [spacebar] to toggle sub-hotkeys.

For example, rather than hitting Space, and then navigating with your mouse through the menu (and wasting precious time) you instead would:

Spacebar -> "A"key for “Add” -> "A"key for "Mesh"menu -> "C"key for Cube

basically, the menu would visually correspond to your keyboard, and users could arrange it to their preferences by drag and dropping different primitives into the empty keys that they like. (and maybe even save their own primitives that would auto-append from another file? Like that base mesh you made of a dog, or dinosaur or human …)

another example: Spacebar -> "T"key for “Transform” …

get the idea?
Wouldn’t this be a simple but yet useful and slightly more productive way of working?

~ Mark

p.s. an even crazier idea: Blender people love sharing their blends, wouldn’t it be easy to set up a server (?there probably already is one out there?) that Blender could temporarily access. So that way people could (from inside of Blender) hit Space -> Add -> Online Library … and then browse & download community contributed meshes? … and then (from inside Blender) upload their own?

#2

An interesting idea, suggest it to the developer for 2.5. There is a similar thing though, the Blender Material Library script for materials, although it isn’t online.

#3

Where would I do that?

#4

BTW, in case I confused you, what I meant by it not being online was that the materials stored aren’t online, the script itself can be found here:
http://uselessdreamer.bytehost32.com/scripts/blebder_library.py

#5

"C"key for Cube doesn’t work that well when cube is translated to some other language. Hence it might make more sense to follow Blender standard in this case. Normally you can access menu items by using number keys (example: w -> 1 etc.). This doesn’t work in case of menus containing submenus yet though.

#6

This doesn’t seem to work in Blender 2.45 anymore. On my numpad, the 3 and 8 just acted like arrow keys, moved the highlight up and down in the w menu – nothing was selected. (This happened with num-lock both on and off.) Same behavior on the snap menu – 3 and 8 moved up and down, other number keys just highlighted the first entry. Nothing was selected.

#7

Note that standard number keys below function (F1 etc.) keys are ~not~ same thing as the numpad keys. The convention works on these number keys only.