Now that you have an understanding of how to customize the Blender interface and are
familiar with many of the user preferences, let's jump back into the user preferences
and take a look at how to customize various hotkeys within Blender.
So to customize hotkeys, you're going to go to your user preferences and then underneath
the input panel, you can see your different hotkeys here.
So these are all the different sections that we have available to switch through.
There's obviously quite a few of them, but let's just take a look at something simple.
So if we wanted to say change the hotkey that you use to rotate the 3D view, which by default
is just middle click and drag, if we wanted to change that, we would first go into the
3D view section.
So we'll toggle this down and let me just expand my window so that you can see this
a little better.
And we can, first of all, we'll toggle this back.
I just had looked at it previously, but this is what it should look like by default.
So if we toggle down 3D view, we can then see all the different sections within the
3D view, such as global 3D view, object mode, mesh, curve, armature, et cetera.
And in this case, if I wanted to change how to rotate the view, this is going to be under
3D view global because no matter what editing mode I'm in, it's going to be a global option.
So I'll toggle this down and we can see all the different settings here.
So we've got our rotate view right here.
So first of all, I can enable or disable this.
I can also delete it by hitting the X if I want to just remove this entry completely.
Or to edit it, let's just toggle this down and we can see that this is the actual path
for the code that it's using because you can actually, this is the Python path basically.
Next we have the mouse button that it's using.
So this case it's middle mouse button.
And we have, whether it's a press, release, click, or double click, the actual key is
listed here.
And then we have modifier keys right through here.
So I could either, if I wanted to say change this to the left mouse button or something,
I could just click this and then click again and it would be left mouse, or you can change
it here.
So in this case, I'm going to leave this at the middle mouse button and I'm just going
to add a modifier key.
So we'll just add in the alt key.
So now if I go back to the 3D view, if I middle click and drag, it doesn't do anything.
But if I middle alt, middle click and drag, then it rotates around as expected.
So pretty simple to change most any hot key you wish.
Let's just reset this back to default, which by the way you can also do.
If you just click restore right here, restore is an option.
If any of the hot keys within this section have been edited, if I click restore, that
will restore them back to default.
So you can see all of our different hot keys here.
There's obviously a lot of different ones.
If we get out of the 3D global, we could go into say object mode, which is the mode that
we're in by default.
Again, I'll talk about these here in a little bit, but you can see all the different hot
keys for these.
If you want to add a custom hot key, you can simply click add new, and then you toggle
this down and you can set the Python path.
So this gets a little bit more complicated, but basically you find the, as you can see
in the tool tip here, the Python path is the key map item.id name.
And so if we look at any one of these, such as join, you can see that it's object.join.
And this gets much more complicated, but you can find these various ways for the different
objects, such as, for example, if I go to say smooth shading here and I hover over it,
you can see my Python tool tip is bpy or blender python.ops.object.shade.smooth.
So if we were to go back to our user preferences and in this add new, this is going to be object.shade.smooth.
And if I just set this to, let's just say, control shift s.
Whoops.
No, not control shift s.
That's save file.
Let's just do control alt s.
That is also save file.
How about this?
We'll just do, how about alt shift s?
Should work.
We'll set it to alt s and then hit alt and shift.
There we are.
So now if I have this object and I want to shade it smooth, it should do alt shift s
and it will shade it smooth.
So if you want to add the custom hotkeys that aren't already there, that's how you do it.
You first find the tool path, then you set the key and any modifier keys that you want.
And then of course you'll save your default configuration.
Or if we don't want this, we can just click delete and it will remove that hotkey.
So that's it for editing hotkeys.
But now real quick, let's take a look at a very easy way to add hotkeys.
What I've just showed you was a little bit cumbersome, but also very good because it's
very, very precise and you can do absolutely anything you want with the hotkeys basically.
But in most cases, if you want to just add a hotkey very quickly, you don't want to have
to go through that entire process.
And sometimes you may even want to add a hotkey that's only a temporary one for a specific
project that you're working on.
You can actually add hotkeys simply by right clicking on the tool.
So for example, going back to the smooth shading, if we want to add a hotkey back for
the flat shading, I can simply right click on it, choose add shortcut, and then maybe
I'll just hit Alt Shift and F and that will add in the hotkey.
So if I hit smooth now and then Alt Shift F, it will set that back to smooth shading.
And if we take a look at our 3D view global hotkeys now down at the bottom, it has given
it should underneath object mode.
We should now have one for shade flat as you can see here.
So it's done the exact same thing as doing it manually, but it's obviously added it much
quicker.
Now the reason that I showed you how to do it step by step manually beforehand is because
there will be some cases where it's not really possible to do that.
So for example, if you wanted to say add a hotkey for some of these options down here,
such as maybe switching the limit selection to visible to on or off, if you right click
on this, there is no hotkey for this.
However, you can find the data path here by saying use occlude geometry.
So by doing it manually, you can add a hotkey for this.
But since this is not a normal command, then sometimes you can't do that.
And so for most tools, adding the hotkey via right click works great, you can change or
remove shortcuts that way as well.
But other times you have to do it manually.
So that's why I showed you both.
That's it for editing hotkeys.
Very extensible, but a little complicated at times.
But again, you can set a hotkey for basically anything.
And so it really works quite well.