[SeonaVDP]

Hello, I am new to BforArtists today and have been checking it out. I’ve been using Blender for some years now and certain keymappings have become part of my DNA as a result. I am wondering the rationale behind changing the following hotkeys…

e – extrude (in edit mode)

g – grab (move)

s – scale

r – rotate

These are probably the most used keys on my keyboard and are all within reach of my left hand so I can keep the right one on the mouse. Is there a reasoning behind changing them to letters that don’t match the function? If I change them back to the default, what functions will I overwrite and need to change? It’s gonna take some real mental gymnastics to wrap my head around new keymappings for these core functions.

And finally – is there a definitive list somewhere of the new keymappings in BforArtists that I can print out and refer to when needed?

Cheers! (also good job, it looks great and everything is reallly easy to find! About time Blender had a better looking, sensible UI!)

[Reiner]

Hi SeonaVDP,

The reason for the change was to have the so called home row for navigation. W, E and R. Which is a very common navigation scheme outside of Blender. This allows you to work with the keyboard without the need to look down where your fingers are. That’s common to me

Well, E was occupied now for rotate. So the extrude key needed another home. S was free now. That’s basically the story behind it

But nothing is lost. You can at any point simply switch to the Blender keymap. It is still available. We don’t have a reduced version of the Blender keymap though. You need to use the full keymap here. You can switch the keymap in the splash screen for example. Don’t forget to save the startup file to make the change permanent.

And finally – is there a definitive list somewhere of the new keymappings in BforArtists that I can print out and refer to when needed?

This list is a chapter in the manual. At least for the default keymap. The Bforartists full keymap needs still documentation, it isn’t included here yet. https://www.bforartists.de/data/manual/2.1%20Bforartists%20Standard%20Keymap.pdf

[SeonaVDP]

hi Renier, thanks for your reply! Does switching to the blender default keymapping lose all the other custom hotkeys you’ve done?

[Reiner]

Yes, of course. It’s not this much custom changes though. Since the useage in Bforartists is around the graphical menu. The other big change is the viewport navigation. And we have of course simply removed a ton of hotkeys in the standard keymap too. But even here, we have a Bforartists Full keymap, which uses most of the Blender hotkeys 

It’s unfortunately too long ago, i cannot say what conflicts you may introduce when you change the WER keys back to SRG. One is extrude. But that is simply putting it back to E. For the other two keys you need to have a look in the input manager. But it might even work. 

I made a list of the most important differences here: https://www.bforartists.de/wiki/Quickstart#changes

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