I hope you developers know what you are doing because for me its like just killing years of experience with blender.
With left click as default makes anyone who is experienced with blender unable to make new tutorials since they cant use blender properly.
I hope you make a really clear selection prompt to make sure users know there are two options of selection otherwise, it will be really confusing for tutorial makers having to overwrite their whole muscle memory just to teach stuff for newbies.
The first launch splash screen will be the place where you choose left/right click (with left selected by default). Also experienced artist can switch anytime in the settings panel (formerly user preferences area)
I mean, Its not just to make the option, it shoud be clear and obvious that there are two options. its not just putting a enum there in the corner so the user could set it, the ideal would be to force the user to choose one of the two options so they know there are two ways.
If the default be left, and the use dont notice we would be in trouble since the left would become slowly the assumed only option until the developes assume they can just remove right.
@brecht, @billrey
Some addons implement selection functionality, how are we supposed to continue with the implementation since now the left is the default?
2.8 will require a whole change not only to tutorials but also addons…etc many thing won’t be the same from 2.7x and people should just adapt to Left click anyway since 2.79 will go obsolete, it makes working with other softwares much more easy and the hardcore right click users should not stay hung up with it too of course they have the experience to navigate blender but that’s their choice.
Tutorials should be simpler from now on. They can leave out the section at the beginning which many of them have, explaining how to switch to left click select.
@ billrey, part of the tutorial needs is also to teach the keymap to the newbies, how would you go with tuts? since the userbase is strongly split now, we would have to teach both keymaps but we only can dominate Right click.
I never saw any tutorial like this.
The problem is that the users will be obligated to learn by themselves now, the comunity will not be able to nelp much newbies, its like making users having an official left or right language…
i don’t think keymap affects your learning unless you are an absolute beginner who need to see every key press or something …i learned blender with LMB while watching old 2.79 videos and had no problem and once i was comfortable with it, it just clicked of course still way to go, but at least how i see it, it’s not a probelm if the instructor use right or left as long as he/she tells you what the functionality is.
For tutorials is worst the part where you use the right click and isntead of move the cursor you have a context menu. Or the new pie menus that user cannot deactivate. I’m waiting that both config are optional to allow user to use blender 2.8 keymap with only swap the left/right click and without pie menus.
I can’t understand why some people keep saying tutorials will be a problem. I learned Blender by watching tutorials like most users, and I didn’t had any problem following tutorials made by left right click users even when I had my own defaults set to left click select. Is just an option, if the person doing the tutorial explains this at the beginning then there’s no reason to believe people will be so confused they won’t be able to follow.
IMHO, both left and right should be a single keymap.
only with swapped mouse buttons, not whole different key systems. it only makes harder to tutorial makers.
This is a general thing for tutorials: In Blender you can customize the keymap completely, customize the theme, the layout - everything.
If you make tutorials I would suggest two things:
Use default settings as much as possible
Try to not refer to features by their hotkey only. Do not call it ‘N-key panel’ or ‘W-menu’, but refer to features by their name, and secondarily (optionally) mention the default hotkey if there is one.