Stuff I learned about Blender Shortcuts (Hotkeys) on Linux

Blender Courses Talk
, ,
1

I’m using Blender 2.78b on Lubuntu (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS). Some items may apply to other OS’s as well.

  1. Ctrl-J (Join objects in Object Mode) only works if your mouse is in the 3D viewport. Took me embarrassingly long to figure this out because I was practicing object selection in Outliner & just left my mouse there while I hit Ctrl-J which did nothing. I could use the Tools menu item ‘Join’ but no joy with shortcut until mouse was over the window. This is a common issue, even hovering over a header can sometimes disable function. It’s a safety feature in a way.

Order of selection is important: Final (joined) object data is stored in an object with the name of the second object selected.

  1. ALT (e.g. ALT-Right Mouse for loop select) does not work at all on Lubuntu (and many other Linux distributions) unless you modify the window manager (OpenBox) because ALT-RightMouseClick & ALT-Drag are used by the manager to resize the window. I don’t care about that so I went into Window manager settings and commented out those two mouse-keybindings*

  2. Shift-TAB snap to target requires cursor to point to target, otherwise you can move the desired vertices/faces/object right up to where they are supposed to be and nothing snaps into place. Only time this is not necessary is with Grid because Blender knows the target is the grid. This took me ages to sort out, and only by trial & error accident. Seemed counter-intuitive because one is manipulating the other object so it would make sense to have cursor on it, but nope, not the way it works!

  3. P separate key – it’s a good idea to hit Z before Box selecting otherwise you’ll only select & separate the visible faces, not the backside faces. Ask me how I know! :wink:

  4. CTRL-Tab gives quick select menu so can change mode (Vertex/Edge/Face). Some people remap this to the 1,2,3 keys but then you lose the ability to choose layers (coming later!)

Dell

*it’s a bit tricky, but if you feel comfortable with editing configuration files here’s what I did on Lubuntu to free up my Alt-RightMouseClick mousebinding & ALT-Drag mousebinding:

  1. backup then edit lubuntu-rc.xml (Found it /home/<username>/.config/openbox/ )
  2. Comment out the A + Right click & drag items. OpenBox calls the ALT key “A”. Comments are same in XML so you comment using same as HTML (<!-- comments in here--> or after a hash #comment). Ran the XML thru an online validator to make sure no typos.
  3. Logout/Login.
    Blender should now have full access to ALT-RightMouse &ALT-Drag
  4. Enjoy!
    PS Supposedly there are ways to make application specific changes to OpenBox configuration using the class name of the app (Blender). However, I could only figure out how to add functionality, not how to disable the ALT key combos.