Numpad emulation only when a specific key (combination) is pressed
First, I'd like to thank you guys and girls for the awesome product that you improve for us, users, every day.
My idea is very simple. I am using a laptop to work with Blender. The laptop has no numpad, so I decided to emulate one. However, when I emulate the numpad, my edit mode hotkeys for switching between vertices, edges, and faces (1, 2, 3) are in conflict. I press 2 and instead of switching modes, I change camera positions. I feel like it would be better to emulate numpad only when a specific key or a key combination is pressed. Checking the box in preferences is nice but it doesn't give me full flexibility as a laptop user.
2 Comments
I have the view hotkeys bound to the normal number keys, while still being able to use the pie menu with ~ or V.
As a laptop user myself, I've had laptops with numpads, and laptops without numpads.
Is the only reason you need the numpad for the view positions? Having those hotkeys on the number row isn't very good imo. The '9' is all the way on the other side of the keyboard... Do you really want to be repositioning your left hand every time you want to go to the top view? And if numpad emulation only happened when pressing a certain key, you would have to be holding that key while also pressing a 1 for front view or a 0 to go to the camera which are on opposite sides so you would need to two-hand the hotkey for at least one of them.
I feel like the better solution is to just rebind them to other hotkeys. I know not everyone has this, but I rebound all numpad hotkeys to an extra button on my mouse. So front is ctrl+button, right is alt+button, shift+button for top etc and the view orbiting, panning and rolling are all different combinations of shift, ctrl and alt with the mouse wheel. Much faster than going to the numpad.
If you really wanted to use the number keys, you could just rebind them all to include alt or something
Honestly, I'm not really sure why numpad emulation exists, since as I've said I think it creates bad workflow. I think it might be meant more for people in management positions who are just viewing a model that someone else made and not actually working on it.