[Bf-taskforce25] Keyboard Shortcuts Proposal

[Matt Ebb]

Haven't had time to go over this proposal yet, will have a better look  
tomorrow, but here's my 2c on the mouse button issue.

On 22/06/2009, at 10:15 PM, Jason van Gumster wrote:

> 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.

On the other side of the coin (anecdotal evidence too :) all of us at  
work use LMB select every day, and it's just fine. Nowadays most of us  
are on tablets though, so not really clicking, but it used to be all  
mice, and no tennis elbow. Not to mention that just about everybody  
that uses any other 3D application will also use LMB select, I don't  
hear many of them complaining and wanting to configure it to RMB ;)

As for RMB select for tablet use, I couldn't agree less. RMB is  
ridiculously clunky for tablets, you have to hover the pen above the  
surface and try to aim, while pushing a side button that will actually  
push your stylus out of the way of what you're pointing at. Not to  
mention that painting/sculpting/etc only makes sense actually using  
the pen as a pen. I can't possibly imagine using RMB select on a tablet!

> 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.

There's another point in LMB select's favour though that's not just  
for new users. For people who use a fair few different apps in a 3D  
pipeline (other 3d apps, external modellers, comping apps, etc) it  
gets frustrating having to mentally switch gears to different  
selection modes every time you alt-tab. That's the main reason why I  
created the LMB select option in the first place.

Anyway, regardless of what is decided upon as the default, it would  
also be a very good thing to have a startup screen when Blender is  
first installed/launched that provides a few keyboard/mouse navigation/ 
selection presets to choose between, perhaps like:
* Blender 2.5
* Blender 2.4
* Max
* Maya
* etc.

This will go a long way towards easing the transition for artists from  
other packages.

cheers,

Matt