Feedback and suggestions as someone trying to migrate from 2.7X to 4.4
This was all tested on Blender 4.4's Steam version, using the "2.7X keymap".
Keymap specific:
- Ctrl+Tab shortcut to leave weight paint mode stops working if you switch to edit mode and back to weight paint mode
- In Edit Mode, the shortcut for the merge menu is M - this should be changed to Alt+M to match 2.7X correctly
- The shortcut to toggle visibility of collections, Shift+[Numbers], doesn't work in Edit Mode - this should be changed to match 2.7X correctly
- In Object Mode, with the Move to Collection menu open, pressing the number keys doesn't move the object to the correct collection - instead, pressing 3 moves it to Collection 1, pressing 4 moves it to Collection 2, and so on and so forth. I propose that 1 should move the object to Collection 1, 2 to Collection 2, etc, with Scene Collection and New Collection being moved to the bottom of the menu
Non-keymap specific:
- GLITCH: Loading a 2.79b .blend file results in all inactive layers' objects having viewport visibility unchecked, requiring the user to check each and every one manually
- Material textures, transparency, etc should be translated into BSDF nodes automatically instead of resetting all materials to default colours
- Merge By Distance should show up in the search when "remove doubles" is entered into the search bar
3 Comments
I guess that statistically, there could be someone in the community that would be happy to edit the keymap preset. The Collection Manager addon brings back QCD slots and their shortcuts.
But for changing the data support and operator search behavior... Blender 2.79b was released 8 years ago, and 2.80 with its massive overhaul came out 6 years ago. And since then we got even more major changes like in 2.90–2.93 with Geometry Nodes and shader API changes, 3.0 with Cycles X, and 4.0 with Eevee Next and a new Principled BSDF...
Even supporting current LTS versions is already quite an effort, other competitive softwares typically don't guarantee backward compatibility either and expect people and companies to hold updates until they are ready for breaking changes.
I get that it's always annoying to not be able to open old files in new softwares, but it's expected, that's why the BF archives all its releases for download . You can try older version of Blender that probably had better backward compatibility due to having fewer layers of breaking changes since 2.79, and then upgrade those files with newer versions.
It's really been that long, huh?
The way you speak of the issue I mentioned with the old files makes it sound like they're completely broken, when it's simply a toggle that's defaulting to the wrong value. It should be trivial to fix once the problem line is identified.
It's not like materials where, as you mentioned yourself, the entire system has changed, so it'd be very difficult to make a proper system to port old materials to the new nodes system (especially anything to do with transparency). I understand that changes happen and time moves on - it's why I was fine with staying on the old version until I noticed the new keymap option a few months ago. That, to me, indicates BF do want folks like me migrating to the new versions, which is awesome to see! The keymap (and the few other things I mentioned) just need that final push to really bring it up to spec. But the devs need feedback in order to even know what's wrong in the first place, hence this.
Trust me, I would have migrated sooner if the original keymap hadn't taken this long to be added to the official release - it wasn't a deliberate choice on my part to wait this long. If I could've been posting this on 2.8's release, I would have, but it just didn't exist at the time, nor for a long time following that.
The 2.7 keymap is not new, it has been there since the early days of 2.8. Purposely to ease the transition.
Some of the points you bring up in this proposal are actual bug reports, such as not working shortcuts or wrong key combinations.