I want to start a chat to talk about collection visibility being controlled by the numbers 1-0 on the keyboard. In 2.79 and below this made a lot of sense as there were a finite amount of layers, but now in 2.8 and up, we have have collections, which can be theoretically infinite.
I feel that currently this makes the 1-0 hotkeys kind of leftovers that haven’t been sorted yet from 2.79. Having the hotkeys is nice until scenes get larger. After about 7-10 collections it becomes a bit cumbersome, as there are no numbers besides collections to help associate what number to press to solo them. Once 20 collections have been made you cannot access further collections made after this point with hotkeys, which feels a bit strange. With this current system you have to organize your collections so that things of the most interest are within the first 20, for easy access. This does technically make sense, but I can’t help but feel it’s incomplete, as it ignores collections past 20, which in productions scenes will certainly be surpassed.
As well, I find myself often accidentally hitting numbers on my keyboard, and then the associated collection gets solo’d. Then I have to turn all my layers back on, which I’m pretty sure there is no hotkey for yet. In very large scenes with many collections this does become pretty frustrating when you just accidentally hit a key, which can happen accidentally, or for other reasons, such as when you think you’re in edit mode and hit 1-3 to change selection modes.
I wanted to see what people think about this. Do you think:
Current Implementation is fine
There needs to be a new system to deal with collection visibility
i think that 1-0 should be assigned on other tasks. Since in edit mode 1,2,3 are assigned to vert/edge/poly - in heavy scene after you going in the edit mode and choosing for example 3 (faces) blender hides all collections and only 3-rd collection becomes visible. It happens because scene is heavy (not couple of characters and some stuff) and blender can not switch to edit mode in time . So in case of heavy scenes 1-0 should be killed at all
This ridiculous behaviour is still messing me up in 2021 with 2.91.
I hate it!
It shouldn’t require a deep dive into devtalk for casual users to figure out what is happening and how to fix it. It isn’t even listed in the current version of the manual.
Solution: Disable keybinds for it in Edit>Preferences>Keymap>3D view>Object mode>Object mode global
What edit mode 1,2,3 does depends on your initial settings. For me, having chosen 2.79 keybindings at first startup, edit mode 123 does nothing, and I use ctrl-tab 1,2,3 to switch between vert/edge/face modes.
It may very well be that collection visibility hotkeys should be changed in other keymaps. I can’t speak for those.
I use number keys to control collection visibility frequently. Yes, it is limited to 20 collections. Yes, there’s room for error. Yes, nesting and collection order make it confusing. But it is so much faster for controlling visibility than any other method. You shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
A good fix might be to associate the numbers used (both for this and move-to-collection operations) with the names of the colllections. Look for collections named “n*” where n is a number from 1-20 and * is a wildcard (and if n = 1 or 2, then consider a numerical second character as part of n, not as part of *.) Then, hitting 2 takes you to the first collection named 2-something (and not 20-something), regardless of nesting; and if you don’t want the hotkeys to work that way, using different naming should be trivial.
