Setting a Hotkey in Blender 2.5x. No more CTRL+TAB hotkey!

 

 

I love Blender, but one of the hands down most irritating things is the default hotkey for switching between Vertex,Edge and Face editing modes.  CTRL + TAB + 1/2/3 is just too many keys for something common.  Fortunately Blender 2.5x adds the ability to define hotkeys, but it isn’t as easy as you might expect.

 

 

The steps:

 

Press CTRL + ALT + U to bring up user preferences.

 

Select the Input Tab

 

Scroll down and expand 3D View –> Mesh, like such:

image

 

Click the Add New button:

image

 

 

Add the following three entries:

 

image

 

 

In my case I am using a Mac keyboard, which has an F16, F17 and F18 key above the numberpad.  You can use whatever value you want ( that aren’t used in Mesh mode already). 

 

The value entered in Context Attrib is “tool_settings.mesh_select_mode”.  The Value: fields represent what modes to enable, vertices, edges and faces in that order.  So True, False, False says to enable Vertices, but not Faces or Edges.

 

 

Now, voila.  I click “Save as Default” and now I have a single hotkey for toggling between the editing modes.  I really should have done this ages ago.  In the meanwhile I learned the Blender customization is downright amazing.

Art


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