When will the keymaps be finally fixed?

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1

Hi,

can anyone tell me why most keymap issues have been reliably ignored for almost a decade now? I’ve created a complete overhaul of Blender’s keymap many people fell in love with, but I am just unable to maintain it anymore for new Blender versions because of how much work it takes. Mainly because of this bug: ⚓ T88518 Add-ons with keymap entries generate duplicates in keymap (But also a few other keymap corruption bugs.)

Sharing keymaps with other people should be something simple and natural. One should be just able to click “Export”, export the Keymap, and others should just be able to import it.

The huge issue is that the keymap currently exports also key bindings defined by addons, and when imported, it duplicates them, resulting in messy and often broken keymaps.

So instead of:

  1. Click export
  2. Share it with other people

Is is:

  1. Click export
  2. Open the python file in a code editor
  3. Surgically remove all the addon cancer

As an insult to injury, one of the recent Blender update changed the formatting of the keymap .py files to be much less human readable, and therefore human editable, making it much easier to break the keymap completely by accidentally deleted one of the endlessly nested brackets. So first we have a broken keymap system which forces us to manually edit the keymap python files, and then on top of that we get a formatting change for no reason, which makes the keymap files much less manually editable.

The solution is very simple - just make the keymap export button not export the addon key bindings. The addons themselves should take care of adding and removing their entries on register and unregister. This small change alone would make it much more possible to rely on export and import button in keymap preferences, instead of constantly requiring users to fix broken keymap files in a code editor.

I could just export the keymap, without worrying there will be any addon stuff, and the target blender installation would not rely on those addons being installed. This would also solve the bug where when the keymap is imported back into the same installation, all the addon entries are doubled. It would solve two issues in one hit - the addon entry export, and the addon entry doubling on import.

6 Likes
2

Well said!
For me the biggest laugh is, that blender is looking / going for industry standard with that keymap management && without light linking. (neva eva!!!)

Also there are so many basics missing (compared to every other 20 year old 3d app).
You have to get the basics via addons, what causes also more trouble in keymaps.
And the list goes on, but you’re right, Keymaps needs quick an overhaul ASAP.

BUT as you see in any official video, there are no addons or remapping of keymaps. So I guess they don’t really see an issue in keymaps, what is really sad.

To be honest, my opinion and info from their sites, chats, … tell me, that this won’t be fixed even in blender 4.2.
Also most of them work as dev for blender and are basically basic 3d and workflow experianced.
And when working with & @ blender, you usually don’t have many real world scenarios and addons installed.

May the force be with them !