"View Selected" should be more easily reachable

Working in a studio I’ve been teaching my colleagues Blender for a while now, and one of the most
common problems when explaining navigation is searching for the mysterious “period on a numpad” key to be able to focus on an object. I think we should change the hotkey, because:

  • Not everyone has a keyboard with a numpad
  • View Selected is a frequently used operator, but currently you can’t reach it with one hand
  • It would simplify navigation for the newcomers, reducing the frustration after they moved the viewport origin too far and scale\zoom becomes too slow, by making them reset the origin with View Selected more often.

SOLUTION
As a new Hotkey, I propose Shift+V

It has these advantages:

  • Currently only used for Vertex Slide in edit mode, but Vertex Slide is more commonly used with double tap G, so it shouldn’t be a problem to free it
  • Starts with V for (V)iew Selection, following Blender shortcut terminology

Hi, there is a pie menu called View which includes View Selected, that’s mapped to ` (the grave accent).
I think that is already supposed to be the “official” replacement for those who don’t have a numpad, 'cause it also includes Camera, Front, Side and Top View.

While this menu definitely helps, it doesn’t solve the issue of searching for buttons, because ` is another hard-to-find button that is keyboard and layout dependent. One way to go about it would be to change the View pie menu to the shift+v instead though

I personally use SHIFT ALT MMB for Frame Selected, that shortcut is not used by default and combined with vanilla ALT MMB Center View to Mouse makes navigation a lot easier.

1 Like