[Bf-taskforce25] Keyboard Shortcuts Proposal

[William Reynish]

Hi, thanks for sharing concerns.

On 22 Jun, 2009, at 2:15 PM, Jason van Gumster wrote:

> Hello,
>
> My concerns echo Pablo's pretty closely, but I will actually express
> some issues with the mouse buttons. I feel it's way too heavily
> weighted on the left mouse button. Your proposal doesn't cover
> confirm/escape behavior on the mouse. Assuming that remains as-is,  
> that
> puts five functions on the left mouse button. I'm on Blender a lot,  
> for
> long stretches of time. Excessive left-clicking can and does lead to
> tennis elbow. Furthermore, right-click select is actually idea for
> tablet use. Please keep these things in mind.

I've mostly heard to opposite argument. The more you have to use you  
*fingers* for clicking, the more likely you are to get a tennis elbow.  
The more you alternate between left and right clicking, you train your  
fingers to do the clicking work and not the hand. This is one of the  
reasons Macs used to ship with single-button mice - to alleviate  
ergonomic issues.

I'll investigate this some more though. Do you have any links to  
support this concern?

> Helping new users is an admirable goal (trust me, I spend a lot of  
> time
> with new users) but my impressions of 2.5 is that it's purpose is to
> improve the experience of existing Blender users moreso than new  
> users.
> I'm not keen on using conventions for the sake of conventions. The
> current system *does* work. There are some consistency issues, sure
> (namely Lasso select), but it fits the left-confirm/right-escape
> paradigm and it's extremely effective for extended use.

Yes, indeed, we shouldn't sacrifice speed for the sake of ease of use.  
In fact I never see those as opposites, because something that is  
*fast* is almost always more *direct* and therefore easier to use.

If you have to go through many hoops to reach a goal, it is both slow  
and hard to learn.

However we cannot assume that users only use Blender. They will most  
likely jump between Blender and Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Final  
Cut, or Modo or even Maya! This is as big a part of the argument for  
left-click select as the fact that it makes it faster to learn.

But yes, this is something to consider. Luckily we can do an optional  
'trial' keymap in 2.5 once the keymap editor is in place. Then we can  
test it out in practice.

> That's my piece on this. Hopefully I don't stir up a hornets nest on
> this, but I feel more consideration needs to be had on this.

No, if one writes a proposal to change Blenders mouse buttons, you  
know you'll stir up a reaction of some sort ;)

-W