Left click select is now the default in Blender
It happened! After years of debate, the default right-click select that often confused new Blender users has been replaced with (gasp!) a left-click!
Brecht writes:
Defaults: left click select is now the default.
A few reasons motivating this change:
- It works well for all devices: mouse, trackpad, and tablet pens.
- For beginners or users coming from other software, it's easier to get started and avoids an initial stumbling block.
- Many users in 2.7 (about half?) were already using left click select, so combined with the above advantages it makes for a practical default.
- Note that we continue to support right click select, as many experienced
- Blender users (and developers) see efficiency advantages in this approach.
The option to switch is in the first time setup splash screen, and in the
user preferences.
As a long time user of Blender, I learned to thrust the developers, if they feel this is the way to go, I will adapt, it’s not the end of the universe I think…
Dat’ thrust factor, though… ;)
Oh my god, right click forever hahahaaha #resistence #unitedwestand
Just kidding, i’m sure that’s the best decision
read it as: united west and…
the whole gui is bad!!!!
XD
Honestly I fully understand for new users and users switching from other packages.
I’ll have to simply readjust. But I do expect a lot of pushback by many. Just like removal of the Game Engine, or any other major change.
Just part of life. Wonder if this is now part of today’s Blender Build?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
;D
Kind of sad. Blender has caved and become everyone’s code bitch and a conformist to the lazy expectations of users of commercial software. Once upon a time too it was about community contribution and independent even contrarian integrity, now we are supposed to only pay continuously to sit and watch an elite team half way behind a pay wall integrate commercial code in exchange for their sponsors money. Blender has sold its soul in order to run with the big boys. Blender brought to you by Nvidia, AMD, Disney and all, and now left click select… I think ambition and ego got in the way…
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Do you really want Blender to stay against the rest of the world?
Do you think they should not integrate the newest things that are created, Nvidia optix, disney shaders, etc?
Go live in the caves and shut that mouth.
I have no intention of taking instruction from you. Mind your manners.
Watch your language please.
Thanks Bart. People should be able to give their opinion without being attacked.
People on the forums these days probably don’t appreciate that where Blender is now is about 180 degrees from where it was 15 years ago in a cultural sense. Indeed ‘Blenderheads’ of old would be startled and even dismayed by the change. I guess if you are only interested in getting commercial stuff for free then you don’t care but it does somewhat disrespect all those who have gone before and built Blender up. IMHO.
pretty sure the biggest contributor group even to the various blender funds is still the users and it’s not a bad thing to have large entities contribute to blender.
just means more development with the same ol’ blender foundation in charge. if blender somehow stops being FOSS then i’d worry.
what commercial stuff are we getting for free?
i’m pretty sure even though the people hired by the blender institute get a lot of recognition that most of the developers are still volunteers as well.
not sure how i feel about left click being default now. good for the newbies i guess… feels a little wrong.
someone flipped my normals.
after 10 years i’ll still be using right click…. not that it didn’t throw me for a loop when i started lol.
Big_Fan,
I can see the point you are going to make, but I still diagree.
First, Blender being different has indeed been a sign of independency, but never has been a kind of “withstanding” some kind of “evil influences”.
second, traditionally it has been open source software conforming to standards, while commercial ones, notably the big ones, tried to deviate and undermine standards in order to force users to their own stuff, in terms of file formats, protocols, whatever, and thus binding them to their non-standard-conforming software.
While .blend file format is inherently non-standard, blender always had a strong set of import-export capabilities and always strived to follow standard file support, as collada, fbx, alembic, and had a strong support of major image- and movie standard file formats.
It’s absolute nothing wrong in implementing things that are becoming standard. It has nothing to do, as you are implying, with bowing against commercialization. It’s the oposite: Having strong standards has always been a way to keep you independant from single solutions.
As it looks to me, blender never left an inch of battleground when its freedom had been chalenged by proprietary software companies.
It owes its today standing to this fact.
Instead, it has become so important and interesting not to software industries, but to animation industries and therefore hardware industries, that they now are very much willing to contribute to blender anyways.
I don’t see blender selling it’s soul to disney or amd. But these companies are as free to contribute to blender as anyone else, as long as they don’t corrupt it.
Disney is no competitor in terms of Software. It’s a customer. Disney likes standards because standards give them freedom of choice in terms of software.
They do software development not in order to sell software, but to contribute to their own business, and thus prefer to keep it as free standards, to help them keeping independancy of software companies.
Blender is as important as a software that hardware vendors like intel and amd are now lining up at blender institute to help them that their CPUs and GPUs and are sucking out any advantage out of blender they can provide, which is a good thing.
This is due to the strongnes of blenders standing, no need in any way of blender bowing to their guidings, as far as i can see.
You still don’t need to pay anything to be able to use blender on it’s fulest potential. Blender cloud is not needed to use blender in any way. It just gives you some convenient benefit, most of which you also may get anywhere else (Textures, models, workshops, tutorials, renderfarmings etc) and which you also would have to pay if you’d buyed them anywhere else.
Blender development not only still gets important contributions out of the comunity, it also still recruits a reasonable amount of its paid developers from the comunity. Which is also te case for the artists that are hired for the movie projects. Which both is a good thing.
So blender still heavily relies on its comunity. Its not true that the comunity has become a kind of a bystander only watching the professionals doing all the decissions and work.
Uh that has gotten a really long post…
As a blenderhead of that vintage, having been using Blender even before the open source days, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I give this troll attempt about optional left-click-select a B+. Plausible, but totally overwrought for the subject.
But don’t you agree that it is better for most? If you want, you can still use right click, you got the choice. And is it really wrong to appeal to a wide mass of people? What is the alternative? Stay obscure and different for no valuable reason? You have to remember that people need to be paid to do good work, nobody will work for free for a long time (you neither, right?) and Blender being useful to more people mean more money donated. This is also what brought us 2.8, it would not have happened without all these people paying for it. I work a lot with opensource (I’m a Linux System admin) and you would not believe how many great opensource projects floundered and died because they did not get money or support, i.e. had a very small user base. That did not make them more glorious or better. In some cases, they did not die outright, but just never moved anymore, no new code and after years of nothing they became irrelevant.
I myself am a left clicker. I was so glad I was given a choice to configure it before, because right click, after having worked with left click to select for more than 20 years just tripped me up and made working really hard.
The Blender interface is still very unique and great, it is misunderstood often, but all that give it a chance find that it is very efficient and great if you want to work fast. And that does not count left / right click, even though I do know that left click does have some small drawbacks, which I can live with.
Don’t you want to be part of a great community that is much larger? Knowing that a great project, a project that YOU are part of is now finally getting the recognition it always deserved? I for my part am.
And I agree with Bart, we should all be civil and see each others standpoints and learn from them.
BIG FAN I understand your point. I wish Blender could work with, say, 1000 users around the world, all of them right-clicking to select. But reality is not so. Blender is a nice ship, a beautiful ship, but it has to be prepared to face the sea. The crew cannot say “we don’t agree with the state of this sea (reality) and we will navegate only in shallow and calm seas (of our own particular world)”.
As I said here, Blender deserves to have 1000 times more users, which means 1000 times more resources to development, including money.
What about have our own headquarters, not rented, but buyied?
What about have more money to hire developers?
Ok, left-click alone will not provide these things. But it’s an important item to prepare the ship to the open sea.
I’m sure Blender could stay behind not using all the new technology, and not adapting to the market.
But that’s just being different for the sake of being different (a.k.a. stupid).
@Metrowind: But honestly, how is left clicking to select a new technology? That existed since there were mouses and keyboards on PCs or other computers, so basically 30 years ago.
I think it was just necessary to realized that 99.9999999999% of the rest of the world uses left click to select.
Please, name a single way that all of the sponsorship (that have helped with Blender development) have in any remote way altered the way Blender works, impeded the Blender community, turned Blender into a sellout, or any such thing you seem to fear, Can you even?
I too get skeptical sometimes whenever big companies want to dip their hands or place their names near endeavors and products that I enjoy and prefer to use. (For instance, I still don’t like Microsoft, in particular, sniffing around our community.)
But in this case, there were many reasons for Blender developers to accept sponsorship and development assistance here and there–Blender community only provides so much financial support and development help.
“Free” is never truly free–it takes money, time, and platform to support it, esp,, the larger the endeavor is and the further its reach. These other names like NVIDIA, AMD, Disney, etc., are interested in helping Blender, largely because it helps their own business. But they don’t own Blender in any way, nor have they altered Blender for the worst.
You wouldn’t have half the nice new features you’re seeing emerge within Blender, if weren’t for the “big boys” offering to help. They’re not changing the way Blender or its community operates. If anything, Blender seems to be changing the way THEY operate, with these companies releasing more open-source initiatives in recent years, and targeting more 3D enthusiasts and small businesses (the likes of Blender users).
Feel free to feel differently, but please, don’t spread misinformation, just for being an alarmist’s sake. Sometimes changes can be a bad thing, but sometimes, they’re positive. Blender’s seeing far more positives than negatives.
By the way, many, if not most, of the Blender community have been wanting this particular change (or wouldn’t have minded it, if it occurred earlier), for years now.
This isn’t something being done to satisfy third-party sponsors–this is done for improving the Blender user experience. Left-click is just far more intuitive to use, even if you got used to the right-click default. But it’s all optional. Which is good.
Your comment is a prime example of the entitled people who expect nothing to change if it causes them any mental inconvenience. The majority of people using blender have used left click select for decades. This community you speak of is clearly in favor of this change. Hanging to the past because of purely idealistic views that are based on sunk cost fallacies is the worst thing blender could do. Good software moves forward and discards the bad and replaces it with good.
All you are doing is channeling your own displeasure and disagreement with this change as something that is pure works of fiction by inventing people and groups who want to destroy blender. Only person who is against progress here is you.
Now this is what I call advance!
Computers standard for select is left click, for text, vetorial design, 2D, 3D, 4D. It’s universal, because the index finger have more connections with the brain, it is more used, it’s natural.
Blender deserves to have 100 times more users that it has nowadays. And for that, it’s ok to choose their own way. But not on certain things like right-click selection. Let’s do this in more important points that only Blender have, like: flexibility of panels and windows, total customization capability, power to work in 2D, 3D, video editing, render without a need of third part (external renderers), modelling, sculpting etc etc and many more delicious etceteras.
After all, the old fashion users can switch to the tradicional right-click system.
“…It’s universal, because the index finger have more connections with the brain, it is more used, it’s natural.”
Huh. Learned something new.
Well I’m left handed, so I right click with my index! XD
Yes, with Blender you have this option, because Blender is a flexible software, the more flexible that I know.
But I know left handed dudes that prefer use the mouse with the right hand. It’s also an option.
Buy the way: we the right handed should change the mouse position, say, one day each week, to stimulate our right side of the brain, that controls the left hand. Ok, it’s a bit tiring, but we should…
You know, I used to do that and wow, it is TOUGH! I have great respect for left handed people and think that tools and utilities like mouses should be made to work for left handed people as well. Three has been a lot of discrimination in the past, superstitious beliefs that left handed was bad, which is totally dumb and bullshit.
We are not all the same, we are all different. And I think you can configure the mouse in operating systems to be used with the left hand.
Booooo! I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is, but I definitely feel that there is an efficiency gain with right click select. Maybe I’ll try left for a week, but I’m sure I’ve tried it already in the past and switched back very quickly. I think Blender is not Blender without right click!
The only efficiency bonus right click select has is because blender has been built the wrong way around to support it. It’s like using your right hand to handle a mouse that has been specifically contoured to fit your left hand perfectly. No wonder it feels better in the left hand that you don’t normally use to move the mouse! Is it actually better tho? No and most people still use their right hand with the left handed mouse and just switch the buttons around. It works but it is not ideal.
Now when things change so that both modes of operation are equally supported then left click select will be superior as it is in every other software out there. If right click select was superior it would be industry standard in computing. It isn’t.
hey TAS, explain to me the efficiency of left click select in things like texture painting or weight painting? face selection masking for painting? changing what bone you’re painting weights for?
right click select can easily be more efficient since tools are always going to be wanted to be used on left click. in painting programs they actually have tools for selecting things on their toolbars. you have to change tools to select. they don’t tend to have selection on right click because it’s not something you tend to do much of in a painting program.
so no, not everything is universally “left click select.”
everything is “left click main action” and “right click secondary action” it just happens that in a lot of cases on the computer the main action is selection.
if they added a simple select tool to the toolbar all the left clickers would be surprised to find they don’t mind right click select in many cases for things blender can do because it is actually more efficient.
i can easily explain the efficiency of right click select in those cases.
can you easily explain the inefficiency of left click select in those cases?
(i’ll give you the answer. it’s because selection isn’t the user preferred main action even for people who want left click select)
Your comment is based on how blender works and you assume that because it is in blender it must be the right and only way to do things. You just don’t want understand that right click select works because it was designed to be that way. People don’t want it. Over 80% use blender left click select!!!
If you want to be microsoft and tell your customers what they should want and force them to like something they hate then you might have a point.
If you put similar amount of effort into development of left click select as there have been poured into the right click select then it will be even more useful and efficient. New users are also important. Too many people in blender suffer from serious case of sunk cost fallacy and sometimes even envy because the new users have it too easy.
Left click select (lcs) is more than just moving the buttons around. You pretend right click select (rcs) fails because it does not work in a system which was built around lcs. Of course it doesn’t. Rcs WILL be far superior when it is coupled with system that is built around rcs. It is industry standard, it allows more freedom with keyboard shortcuts, content sensitive menus, better management of tools and operations, needs less menus and keyboard shortcuts and is more efficient to BOTH learn and use. Just because there are still cases where it is not there doesn’t mean it will never get there. You can fight it and try slow down things but eventually the better system will win. A system that 80% of the users use and want.
TAS, my comment was based on how every computer system works. blender just happened to have the forethought to realize that putting a menu on the right button may not be the most efficient use of that button.
the efficiency of right click select in the areas i mentioned such as texture painting weight painting etc is because if they did things like normal (paint and select with left mouse button) you’d have to constantly be swapping tools or using extra buttons in order to make new selections rather than just being able to simply select with right mouse button.
this is evident by how many other programs who use the left mouse button to select have to do things that way BECAUSE THEY’RE TRYING TO DO EVERYTHING WITH LEFT CLICK!
so no, adding extra development to left click select won’t really make it more efficient or better than right click select. there are cases where it can be as efficient but overall right click select easily has more potential than left click select especially in 2.8 with some of the changes they’ve made. they could easily make right click even better. left click select can easily be made as efficient as it is in other programs… meaning average efficiency.
also, where are you getting that 80% of users statistic? is that one of those things where 94.836548% of statistics are made up on the spot or did you read that somewhere?
have you added up the comments from users here to determine that number? (i doubt it)
@DAEDALJS
I may have slightly misrepresented the left/right click usage. The actual poll was about which one should blender offer as default. Not what they were using:
https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/new-blender-ui-proposal
That being said you won’t find any statistic anywhere that supports right click select. Either as want it to be default nor use it.
As for using the mouse buttons efficiently using the right click to place the cursor on screen is a wasted opportunity as well. You just don’t want to see the problems. Because blender uses right click select it can not have right click menus (although it does in some weird places..). So it uses the left click to place the 3d cursor. Both of these are poor ideas for usability, efficiency and learning.
With left click select blender can naturally have use the mouse efficiently without having to expect the new users to relearn how to use their mouse. The less used features can be moved to more complex keyboard shortcuts (placing 3d cursor for example) while the main mouse buttons can be used to make many of the 3 or even 4 letter keyboard shortcuts easily accessible.
The worst part of the right click select is that in most editors inside blender it leaves the other mouse button totally unused. Because you can not put a right click content sensitive menu there in any 3d view you can not have rc menus either in any other editors. This makes using the node editors and animations a memory puzzle because every action is hidden behind keyboard shortcut. EVERYTHING. If you use blender with left click select like the huge majority does then this is a frustrating flaw.
All because the whole whole user experience is built on top of flawed mouse buttons ideology. What quirky little positives you may get out of that mouse button layout is massively offset by the limitations it sets on the whole development of the ui and usability. Right click select cuts deep into what could be better blender and cuts massive chunks out of it severely limiting its current and future functionality.
@TAS
TL;DR stop assuming my comment is based on how blender works and read something for a change. i don’t need a statistic in support of right click select when i’m basing my argument of of how things work and my experience mostly in OTHER PROGRAMS! not just blender.
that experience being left click = main interaction, right click = secondary interaction.
this means i am saying there are times where you’re right in blender about right/left click select and right click menus and times i’m telling you that you are wrong about that.
for a large part of blender menu on right click is not a good idea.
that doesn’t mean right click select in those instances is the best idea either but all the instances where right click is the best idea do happen when a menu is a bad idea…. which is a large part of blender.
for a large part of blender right click select boils down to personal preference once you’ve adjusted to it but a weird or even bad choice otherwise.
there are times when menus on right click would be good.
there are times when right click select would be amazing.
here’s the long frickin’ comment explaining junk if you actually want to interact with another person rather than what you assume someone is saying or thinking.
dang. 82% back in 2013. guess i am in the minority.
i also don’t really care much about the default i change my settings anyway.
i’ve just been sucked into arguing for better solutions rather than outright dismissing right click select even where it’s better and i’m going to continue to do so.
i agree a whole mouse button for the 3d cursor was a waste and just sort of an odd choice. it really threw me off when i first started using blender too. so it’s not that i don’t see the problem with that. it’s just that’s not where i’m saying right click is the best choice and that’s not what i’m arguing for.
i’ve said here a number of times, though maybe not to you, for general modeling it doesn’t matter much if you use right or left click select especially once you adjust to either option. that’s a case where it’s more personal preference than efficient.
also, 2.8 doesn’t have a button just for the 3d cursor anymore which i think is a fantastic choice because even though i use the 3d cursor frequently. there are often better choices for either mouse button depending on the situation.
they turned the 3d cursor into a tool to use and in the various editors and modes with toolbars left click (or left click and drag) now activates use of your active tool. object mode has box select, 3d cursor, transform (a combination of grab rotate and scale), grab, rotate, scale, annotate (grease pencil), and measure.
entering edit mode adds more tools to the toolbar.
this in and of itself is an improvement.
it’s just too bad that they did something stupid with the normal select tool. it just moves the 3d cursor around unless you choose left click select in which case… i just kind of doesn’t really do anything because you’ve already got left click select.
i guess they thought allowing someone to have select on right and left click was weird so they screwed up their own tool even though the 3d cursor tool is on the toolbar RIGHT THERE UNDER THE DANG SELECT TOOLS BUTTON.
i find that more off putting than having both mouse buttons do the same thing when i’ve selected the option for the one to do the same thing as the other does by default.
it’s like forcing me into using a tool i didn’t select.
i mean… i know they’re smart people but they do some dumb stuff sometimes.
left click select in 2.8 means to use the active tool with your mouse you have to click and drag for a lot of things…. but then since you may want to actually put down a dot with the annotation tool (old grease pencil) they’ve realized selection isn’t something you always want on left click. it’s entirely dependent on what you’re wanting to do and tool choice… but then they didn’t quite realize they realized that.
right click menus in a program filled with menus is a terrible waste of a button though. even now they’re only going to give you the w hotkey special menu on right click when you’ve got left click select while they turn the w key into some weird hotswap of selection modes as if people aren’t used to tapping b, c, or holding ctrl+left click and can’t simply still do them. so they moved a shortcut menu you already had to right click and where that menu was they put something far less likely to get used that was already VERY easily done through the GUI and faster done still simply by using the hotkeys for those things.
you can say everything is hidden behind a hotkey but that isn’t true. it’s all available in a various clickable menus and then some. check the headers/footers for the various editor windows and look through those menus like you would in other programs.
i’m also not sure why you think the same issue isn’t there while using right click select where the left mouse button doesn’t actually do anything or rather it sometimes does the exact same thing as right mouse button. that isn’t a result of being built around right click select. that’s just missed opportunity all around.
the shortcuts used are logically connected to similar style uses in the 3d view and modeling window. (shift+a is add menu in every applicable editor)
so i’m not sure what
they did recently add a “quick favorites” menu in 2.8 where you can add whatever things you want to the menu by right clicking on stuff in the header menus, the search menu, ect and choosing “add to quick favorites” because blender is so customizable you can likely set that up as your right click in whatever editor you want but you’ll have to populate the menu yourself which is why it isn’t going to ever be the default right click menu. the hotkey for that is q by the way.
while blender does have a number of 4 button hotkeys they’re all shift+ctrl+alt+letter. all their 3 button hotkeys are a combination of ctrl, alt, shift, and a letter.
i guess you could be talking about navigating menus quickly with the keyboard but i never do that because it feels like more of a hassle to either let go of the mouse in order to type properly when i’m about to have to put my hand right back on the mouse again or it’s too much of a hassle to look at the keyboard and use one hand to hit those buttons i’m supposed to be quickly hitting to speed through the menus which slows me down using the menus that way. in the end it just feel more efficient to just accept
they do end up relegated to things that aren’t used all that often and about the only one i know is ctrl+shift+alt+c for set origin. i don’t bother to learn those hotkeys rather than use the various menus or the search function to get to them.
as i pointed out earlier what you think is due to blender being built around right click select is also a problem even with right click select that users have just learned to work around.
right click select having been blender’s standard isn’t the cause of your problems there. they’re just separate problems that blender also has.
if problems exist with right/left click stuff it’s because they have failed to realize, like you, that the standard is left click = main interaction, right click = secondary interaction.
you’re just overly used to thinking the most common thing you do on a computer is selection and as a negative reaction to not being able to select with left mouse when selection was indeed going to be the main thing you used your mouse for you falsely equated right click select to be a terrible idea rather than a great idea being applied somewhere out of place for your main use needs.
in text editors, like in previous blender versions, you use the left mouse button to move the cursor.
in paint programs you use your active tool with left mouse button.
in video games you do your main action with the left mouse button.
in many video players you play/pause by left clicking on the video.
selection is actually not the defacto use for a LARGE number of use cases.
likewise just because you commonly think right click = menu doesn’t mean a menu is the best use for any given situation. it’s just that in most computer related situations there’s hardly a clear option to put on right click aside from a menu.
you don’t tend to get menus in video games on right click because your control needs tend to be something else.
there are painting programs (such as krita) where you get a graphical brush and color selection pop up on right click and it’s awesome.
in mypaint there was a color history popup on right click at one point. it was great. i think they changed it back to a normal popup menu (the exact same list of menus across the top of the program you know file, edit, blah blah blah) but i’ve been changing it back ever since because it’s a waste of the button.
i briefly thought about making the color picker popup on right click for it but since that’s already got an easily accessible hotkey and or a dockable window, color history was actually more useful on right click.
so yes, there are evident cases where menus on right click aren’t the main or best choice as well because the button could be used more efficiently. you know… like in blender where we’ve got easily accessible menus galore already and even the menus they’d give you were just one that’s already easily accessible.
so the actual standard use is as i’ve been trying to tell people is that left click = main interaction, right click = secondary interaction.
i don’t need a statistic in support of right click select because i’m arguing that it’s not always the best option but there are times when it most certainly is and can easily be worked into blender nicely in those instances and i’d bet even you left clickers would enjoy using it in those cases because of that.
That is a long post. I did read all of it and I appreciate the time and effort you took to write it. That being said we obviously disagree about many things. I might say in some things we agree but even then we go to totally different conclusions.
82% in 2013 is not meaningless number. It clearly shows the priorities in blender were not what its users wanted. If 82% of users said the “modern” ui in windows 8 was a bad idea then should it still continue as is because there are still people who like it? For me I see huge potential in rc menu and one of the reasons I think the 2.8 ui update is little bit flawed IS because a lot of it was built on top the idea that blender is still going to be rc select first and lc select second. Not the only reason but the main reason for sure.
While I do think the left click select is the way forward I don’t think 2.8 is what that choise should be evaluated on. There has been tons of effort spent into making the right click select the way to use blender and just because the program changes defaults to lc does not really mean the first iteration of that is the best possible one. For this reason I don’t want to argue about specific 2.8 or 2.7x keymaps and mouse modes. But for future lcs does free blender up lots of possible directions that were previously blocked by some design decisions.
Right click menus is a a huge potential positive for me. That does not mean right click menus everywhere but there are tons of places where it makes the most perfect amount of sense possible (node editor). Just because it is not used in games (come on..) does not really matter one iota. The content sensitive menus have huge potential because it can show the user a selection of options based on what is being clicked or selected or active while the depth and efficiency of all the keyboard shortcuts can stay as is (or improved).
In many cases not having rc menus in blender does hurt it because the operations and tools ARE hidden behind keyboard shortcuts. There are huge amount of things rc menus could be used in animation, node editor and rigging for example. And most of these are pretty obvious. Like in node editor show active node on viewer. It has only keyboard shortcut to use it. And it is not good design either if having the tool somewhere in the menus qualifies it good enough as a graphical user interface. Context matters always and sometimes in blender it is hard to find the tools and parameters even if you know exactly what you want.
But rc menu is not perfect either. In ue4 you can rc and start typing in the search bar to find and add a node you want. But you need to move your hands constantly between the mouse and keyboard. But what is the alternative? A toolbar can not hold thousands of nodes. You end up with dropdown lists of countless of nodes. Keyboard shortcuts is not a solution either because nobody can memorize thousand keyboard shortcuts. The solution is some kind of compromise of many options. Rc menus are essential part of that solution just like keyboard shortcuts and graphical menus. Just like it should be in blender.
I am also not proposing lc select as a perfect solution. There is no perfect solution. It is a matter of compromises and while in some cases rc select might be better in most cases it isn’t. Switching them around based on priority is not a good solution either. Is it a good ui if in some menus the mouse buttons are inverted just because it is more efficient in that specific mode or case for example? No. The buttons should stay the same (lc or rc) inside the program and switching them around between menus and operations is not a solution. But also in the grand scheme of things blender is the not the only software that people who use blender use. Switching between programs becomes the more difficult the more different they are to use. Keyboard shortcuts are manageable but any operations that you do constantly like view movement, selecting and tool actions are one of the few that should not be altered.
As far as selection goes different programs are built on different needs. In paint software you don’t have anything to select on your canvas (most of the time). That already means the lc can be used for the tool which is the primary operation. In shooters the primary operation is shooting. Select is binded to a button on keyboard. But in 3d software the “canvas” is used both for selecting and tools. Both are primary operations.
Naturally this creates a conflict and is hard to solve perfectly And it becomes even worse when blender needs to serve both worlds inside one program. Sometimes the canvas is like in painting program where there are no need to have select as primary operation. But sometimes the selection is the tool you use 95% of the time. In that difficult environment right click select is much more difficult to make it work. Not just because majority of people don’t want to use blender that way but because the problems that follow from that when it comes to desiging the ui for it and how blender works together with other programs. I am not arguing that rc select is always bad or lc is always good.
To be honest I think your games analogy is total rubbish. If you are going to compare a game that happens in 2d or 3d space where you are most of the time just clicking other things in that 3d space (fps games, platformers) then right click menus are useless. But take a more traditional game that looks more like your excel or paint software. Game like eve for example. Right click menus everywhere. In the right environment it does provide very good interface. But games are such horrible example anyways because they have very few operations and tools available to the user at any given time. In blender the full list of the operations and tools ia available to you at any given point. Hundreds of tools and operations. Just totally irrelevant things most of the time.
Tas,
Left-click select is just arbitrary and de facto. If the first GUI programs used right-click select then the whole world would still be using it, Blender would be the only left-click software, and we’d be talking about how Blender should be right-click based.
It’s like calling the direction toward the Arctic “north,” and considering it the “top” of the globe; completely arbitrary. Or like driving of the right side of the road vs the left, etc.
@SLOWMO75: then try it out and if it does not work for you, keep it at right click to select, you have the option, it is configurable. So you can keep Blender with right click to select.
Already done :] see last comment – I’ve decided!
Really happy about this. I have never used blender with the Right click and I’ve used Blender since 2007, along with many other 3d programs. And I have always had to adjust the settings of coworkers interesting in using blender to use the left click.
Hopefully this makes it easier for new users to get into blender. As for myself, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to unlearn right-click select.
Exactly. I’ll try left-click, but I think my brain is now hard-wired for right-click… we’ll see.
You’ll adapt to it, much faster than you may think you will. You likely already use left-click everywhere else in your computing life. The human brain is very good at acclimating to what’s already familiar elsewhere in life.
Besides, it’s still all optional–you can continue to use right-click. Again, only the start-up default option is changing here–it’s not a removal of the right-click system in Blender.
Logic will find a way…….even in blender
I use Blender since 2008 with the left button only.
Whenever I was going to show someone, trying to make a person like Blender, it was always the same, the person was very confused having to change the click and then left Blender.
For the right-click fan boys, do as I have for years, adjust the settings and use as you wish.
I always set to the left click, but now what I want is the shift + tab to change between vertex, edge and face back in the 2.8! It is one of the best speed up to modeling in Blender, and the speed is where Blender shine.
I couldn’t agree more. The latest build I downloaded brought some nice improvements… But man did that throw me off… 1,2,3 now for vertex, edge, face… lol I am trying to be a good Blender user of well over a decade and adapt… But holy hell at least give us the choice? Maybe? lol I still love Blender. We’re just going through some growing pains is all.
Indeed. Its removal was definitely a step backwards in Blender 2.8x development.
Couple years back coming from the other software packages I had to adopt for right click, so I got used to it with no problems, as I will adapt to left click from now on, think it is good move. Even blender users need from time to time jump between different tools and this will make it more natural.
This is great. To create you have to destroy. I don’t understand why right click is there in the first place. Now we can use it for the context menu. Thanks for common sense developers and users.
Context menus!! How I miss them in Blender! We already have a few: right-click in some places to set a keyframe, for example. Or for join windows.
Now we should have more, over time.
Right click was just more efficient. I allowed two points for interaction instead of the single “left”. I Come from a profession that strictly uses adobe products, and thus have always used the standard “left” click, blender is the only software I have ever encountered that uses this input method, so it definitely was odd to learn, but in practice, I learned why they did this. In many ways, having a menu pop up with one of your easily accessible inputs is inefficient and limits how quickly you can interact, especially with the new UI that has way more visible and exposed menus (and the custom shortcut key/menu). I would look less at other typical software and look more at gaming where you need lightning fast input for interaction – in many of those examples (from platform games to FPS) the left and right are used for the same efficiency reasons.
I might try the left click for a while, maybe I will end up liking it just as I did for right click, but I have a feeling I will be changing my user preferences back to right click.
It had some advantages, actually. But overall, to have right-click as the default for operating all of Blender, it’s brought more setback than efficiency, for new users.
Granted, it’s all optional. Nothing truly got “destroyed” here. Just relocated. I prefer options, rather than unnecessary obsoletism. Everyone’s happy when options exist.
Should that right click select site also changed to left click select?
It is darkest day for blender old fags. Hordes of newbies did their job. :'(
I’ve been using Blender since around 2002. Literally all of your assumptions are SO wrong. Just so, so wrong.
Opinions differ
Oh, stop. The feature isn’t dead. It’s just not the default option. It’s still available. Stop being so melodramatic.
This kind of stuff is stale thinking that truly sets the Blender community back. We’re open-source around here, but ironically not very open-minded.
agree. as long as it can be customized, it really doesn’t bother much.
The point is: they aren’t worried about themselves using Blender, because they know Blender will keep all the options, including a single button to keep ALL the shortcuts the same as version 2.7x.
What annoyed them is that newbies will be able to start using Blender with left-mouse selection. This is horrible — they think — because… because…
1) Blender learning curve will be shorted;
2) newbies will think Blender is a convencional 3d software, like Maia, Max etc so it deserves have as much users as that softwares;
3) newbies will not improve their ring fingers use.
https://www.change.org/p/blender-foundation-right-click-default-for-blender?recruiter=917817571&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition
This is not such a radical change, as old curmudgeons can still stick with right-click… at least for now.
What we can’t do, though, is switch back to nice decent coloured Properties tab icons, so we can immediately recognise their functions. Somebody obviously thought mono icons were cool, but they’re a major step backwards.
Yes, I agree with you here. I’m overall glad for Blender 2.8, but it’s some issues like this one you mention that I hope gets adjusted eventually.
Making left-click the default may go down as the best 2.8 feature. Incredible that it took this long.
Commenting just to say I was here when history was made
I vote for having right-click no longer be an option, even in the preference menu. Why let the users have the option? Remove it like we remove Blender Internal. Leaving right-click in there confuses developers, tutorials, users, screen captures.
This is shortsighted to say the least. Removing users abilities to use the program that the way they want is a great way to alienate people who have made the software what it is, and have made the pieces that we all share to show Blenders capabilities. There is a reason people, like myself, have used, and like to use, what will be the previous default right select in Blender. Right click still has many advantages, like I mentioned in an above comment. With that said, I will try the left click, but I have a feeling that it will slow my workflow down and for me, that is not worth it to simply have a click method familiar to new users with the excuse of “industry standard.” I think if left is the new default, so be it, but we shouldn’t remove functionality simply because some people want something they consider easier.
Don’t worry. You will be able to use Blender the way you want, right-clicking or lef-clicking.
The only change is that the default now will be lef-click. On the User Preferences you can change this.
The advantage is that new users will not give up after a few minutes, like many did in the past.
Why so totalitarian? It’s so unnecessary.
Don’t remove the option. There’s literally no advantage in removing it.
Why let the users have the options? Because sometimes the best option in life is OPTIONS, that’s why.
Also because a few users out there even happen to just NEED this option (you didn’t even think about those perhaps with a hand physical handicap, did you? Not everyone has five fully-functional fingers on both hands).
We’re not all the same kind of user, so why try to force others to be? That’s beyond unnecessary. It’s mean-spirited and just plain stupid.
And, no, leaving right-click in Blender does NOT confuse developers, who are smart enough to know how to plan for the feature or not.
It does NOT confuse tutorials, as tutors can just disclaim that they’re using the RMB setup, and people aren’t going to be SO thrown off by it that it impedes their learning.
And the whole point of offering this left-click default (which every single creative software out there uses as its default), is to HELP the (newer) users–not hinder them.
Seriously, it’s this kind of exaggerated gripe that makes this community, as awesome as it can be sometimes, just one of the most toxic 3D communities around.
No sense ostracizing those who have grown accustomed to Blender’s right-click. We’re a COMMUNITY–not a CONTEST… Be supportive of our user differences around here.
what the heck has happened to the world while i’ve been distracted by that moz hubs sketchfab contest?
i dig deep for a month only to emerge and find the world decided to “s, x -1”
… obviously the origin point of the world is my mouse wheel.
In what version? The 2.8 i downloaded a few minutes ago, right click is stil default!!!
Right click, left click, wathever…
I’m still crying to not have “SHIFT + DELETE”, “SHIFT + INSERT” and “CONTROL+INSERT” working on all blender input (it works in TextEditor, but not in value editor you can find everywhere) instead of CTRL+C and CTRL+V or CTRL+X
As an educator I do think whatever helps people learn is a positive. left click vs right click, I don’t really care. You can change the preferences anyway! But I don’t get why people rag on the blender interface so much. Yes its complicated, But its also very powerful. The most powerful I have ever used. so customisable.
I have spent years teaching final cut pro, and now premiere pro. It was a nightmare trying to stop students using imovie. “but final cut is confusing and has too many buttons” reply “Thats because they actually does stuff!”. And don’t get me started on Adobes interfaces. docks docks docks. everywhere.
The trend towards simplifying and hiding interfaces is actually a negative in my opinion. It makes the introduction to the program easier (less scary) but makes the actual workflow slower. Honestly the thing I find hardest about teaching blender is I am so used to keyboard shortcuts etc that I don’t use the interface buttons. So when I go to show it to a student I have to find those buttons! because they expect them. buttons to scale, rotate and transform are a regression! 3 shortcuts, anyone should be able to remember: s=Scale g=grab r=Rotate .
.. anyway. rant over. click whatever way you feel comfortable with. As long as there is the option to choose who cares what the default is.
make a system to good for everyone. nobody will use.
I have a feeling in the last years: blender users decrease…
Told it a few times; right click select is better for me simply cause it sets Blender apart from every and any other application I’m working on. Helps my brain be set at ‘Blender mode’. Is catering to newcomers and being homogenized the way to go? Does Blender have to feel like any other commercial 3D app? I don’t think so but only time will tell…
Thought experiment – if a new video game came out where you fire your weapon/gun with the right mouse button rather than the left. Weird, right? Imagine how odd that would be, and now you get what new Blender users face.
Game 2.0 would surely switch the mouse buttons to the “Standard” configuration. It’s what people expect. It’s consistent. Any game that expected users to fire their weapon with a different mouse button would fail in the market.
This was not a hard decision, and I can’t believe it took so long to make such an obvious change.
Been using left-click as default for a while now among other personalized keymaps and what not so I am pleased. What I think is more interesting is the selection methods of box and outside object de-select. Also, for those berating the left-click decision, perhaps they do not know or care to realize that left-click was a very much second-class citizen in the blender UX which meant while, yes, users could assign left click to select it was cumbersome and unintuitive for other parts of the UI to continue to have right-click perform actions the left-click “should”.
That’s exactly my point, Supaidauen – I think Right click has survived for so long because it does actually make sense for the way that Blender is ‘used’ – there seems (to me) to be a much better ‘click flow’ while using right click; and yes, you’re right – left click was ok for some uses, but lost functionality somehow in other areas because many parts of Blender still expected a right click for whatever. As I said earlier, I couldn’t put my finger on why left didn’t work for me – maybe some things have been tidied up in the meantime, while I’ve still been right clicking happily. Not sure if I care to find out though :]
Click flow, it’s all about the click flow!
Fully support this. For an open source project to survive new users are crucial and this old style layover has been staring people on the wrong foot for decades. Is it more or less efficient? I don’t know. But from the preview videos it’s seemed sensible to me and norms in software do become established for a reason.
I’ll make the change. I’m sure it’ll throw me for a while but I’ll give it a go and tbh I believe it’ll give me a more unified workflow.
Plus, right click is still there for those who don’t like change. I’ve been using since the 2.4x days and while it will be word at first it just makes so much sense.
Stupid :|
It is a default setting change. Are you admitting you can’t change a simple preference option in the interface menu?
NO!! Betrayers! If I had known 11 years ago that Blender was going to just give in and change to left clicking, I never would have…
J/k, it’s whatever.
I’m so excited for this! This is exactly what it needs. This change impacts me negatively by default but let’s be honest they make it a menu option to switch back. The people crying are just mad they can’t gatekeep anymore.
Blender Devs, Input is very important, that here are so many comments, :) , also I suggest add Maya and 3ds Max to input as Important inputs, today I used Freecad for first time and it was so hard to do anything for me, I then noticed there is a icon in lower right window that I can change input, I set it to Maya (also had blender) and HONESTLY the world of FreeCad became easy for me. no matter what is UI, the input is so important.
Reading headline…. checking current date… not April 1st…. must be true!
We are facing two options here: we can stay with right-click as default, and drive a lot of newbies away. This way Blender will be forever an “exotic” software for a few people. The other option is to keep the originality of Blender where it’s important: customizable panels and windows, not need of external render software, Grease Pencil, VSE and powerful tools for sculpt, texture, edit etc, with an increasingly friendly UI.. This second way is the direction to follow in order to conquer great movie studios, great advertising companies and thousands, millions of users.
Exactly. Everyone around here roots for things like seeing Blender being used in more AAA-level projects, but then some still protest things like making it easier for others to embrace Blender.
This is a very minor change, but a very important step, in the grand scheme of things. It’s very necessary, if we want to see Blender excel beyond just being some hermetic effort in the 3D world.
But, most of all, it’s entirely optional. Nobody’s forcing anyone to adopt the left-click way of things for Blender. They can still use the right-click system.
While I totally disagree, it was the plan (grrrrr):
https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg?t=4898
I think that the right click is the “right click”:
“[Right select] it saves you from mouse strain”
None of my students had problem with right select, once they followed the 5 minutes UI introductions (…can you use Maya without the 5 minutes introduction?).
I’d like to know who are those unknown “new users” that has so many troubles using the right click of their mouse.
… and nice thing will happen when you have to work with blender at the pc of your colleague that has blender the configured the way around.
You can continue using the selection with the right side. No one will forbid you.
I don’t really see why we’re all debating the matter here. The entire right-click option will still exist–just as a switchable option. Your students can still use it.
And many of the “new users” are actually not students, but people coming from other (professional) software, where left-click is king, and Blender’s unconventional right-click system isn’t. The Blender way can be a curve ball for many, for sure.
Students unfamiliar with 3D modeling software at all actually learn Blender better than those who’ve already learned several other software. Much like how a young child learns a language or two much easier than an adult whose already learned one.
My students must use it ;)
What I wanted to say is that people coming from other software should be able to learn the “right” style in few hours while learning: Blender is not more unconventional that other software.
They’ll be after the ‘G’ for ‘Grab’ keystroke next, wanting to change it to T for translate or M for move. Our long-held traditions are fading… :)
Before, I updated 2.8 almost every day. Since ui changed, I became no interested in 2.8. Except eevee, I really don’t know what the meaning of the update. Blender has lost himself, and the new ui combined from photoshop and modo, a commercial taste. not like before, you can really feel free from your heart. It’s getting bad and no interesting. something llike I can’t believe when I switch material node from object to world, I must select from the drop-down list. I can’t play blender in full screen mode, because the tools panel have moved to property panel, and the new tools bar in left just for new user, and space bar with this too. it’s really no useful for me. now is the left click select, what about in weight painting when I want to select&move the bones, what about in painting when I select the face. I can’t believe this. the N panel switching animation you can almost twice as fast, now it is like deliberately showing me the animation. the top bar and the bottom bar take more space, I should close it at first when I open 2.8, many designs seem to be deliberately imitate and not care the user experience.
The new ui&ux looks very cool, maybe you can used this to attract the new user, but slower in operate. I think if I can used eevee in blender 2.79, I will never update to 2.8, no interest in it, it’s become very boring, juts like a traditional software, no special.
I thought the Blender community was smarter. But seeing how many comments and back-lash there is on this topic changed my mind. It’s almost like a religious debate, no reason can be heard, I am so sad about it.
If I was a developer, this change would be done years and years ago and it wouldn’t be up to a question. I still don’t understand why placing a 3d cursor has a whole button assigned to it, how often do you freehand place it? Why a whole mouse button is blocked by this to this day is beyond my understanding, I literally cannot comprehend.
Oh, god, completely agree! Had slipped my mind that the cursor has always had its very own button! Yeah, really strange and mostly useless. I’d banished the 3D Cursor to a Shift+Left Click many years ago now, so it doesn’t get in the way too much. But now that you mention it, it’s probably as big a debate as the LRClickgate.
I mean, who needs the 3D cursor anyway? Sure, we definitely need it, fairly often, but does it really need to hang around the whole time? And as John says, does it really need a whole massive mouse button to itself?! Do any other 3d packages even have a cursor like this? I know Max never did, and I suppose that got on fine without one.
in 2.8 the 3d cursor doesn’t have it’s own button it’s a tool on the tool shelf. the buttons on the shelf don’t actually get activated by clicking on them.
it’s more like a painting program where you select the tool you want to use so the non select mouse button activates that tool.
which in and of itself makes a good case for leaving right click select the default. noobs are going to want to activate that tool with their main mouse button rather than their secondary mouse button because they wont’ have learned to use the dang hotkeys yet.
i didn’t really care much about the default changing but i do think they just caved to new user demand for a reason that they’ve already killed.
In the other hand, a very important item is hidden: where, in the world, Blender save the rendered animations? It save them in an obscure and sinister /tmp folder, which often is deleted as soon as the user closes Blender. Why is that? Why not ASK the user if he (she) wants do save the rendered animation in another place?
I believe you can change that in the settings.
Yes, it can be changed in the settings. But:
1) this important, fundamental, crucial setting about save a rendered animation is hidden in a little and imperceptible corner. Why?
2) why this horrible /tmp folder? A rendered animation is the result of hours, maybe days, of render. It’s the RESULT of all the work. It isn’t temporary files as the folder name suggests. Why not put — by default — the rendered files in a folder IN THE SAME PLACE that the Blender file was saved? What about the default name of this folder be “your_animation”, or “animation_files”, or even “files”, but never, ever “tmp”. And I will say again: this folder is often automatically deleted when the poor newbie closes Blender. I already found this question in forums: “where is my animation?”. Without answer. Maybe some old users laugh and think: “I know and he don’t know, ha ha ha ha ha (villain laugh style)”.
This kind of thing must change in the Blender UI. And I can see that the developers are watching these issues.
For my personal anecdote. Blender default is about as close to how I’ve been customizing the UI for years now. Each time I got a new version of Blender I’d change the default skin to a darker color, switch to left click select, close the timeline window, move the window bar to the top, and create a couple of custom workspaces/window configurations similar to what are available as tabs now, while deleting some of the weird defaults that were in the dropdown menu before. I’d also turn on a few addons like the spacebar menu with added functionality. So for me, a user since 2.43, this seems like a good update.
As far as left-click select backlash goes…um, this is not just a “commercial software” or “commercial 3D software” standard, it’s pretty much a universal standard for ALL software. You select things in Krita and Gimp, with left click, you select things in OpenOffice and LibreOffice (select letters in a sentence for instance), with left click. In fact I can’t think of a software other than blender where “selecting things” is right click, although I’m sure there are some obscure things that exist out there. To go even further, you point at (choose) things (usually, I have seen some odd people use their middle finger), in real life, with your “pointer” finger, and the cursor on a computer screen is also called a “pointer”, and that is typically the finger that is on the left mouse button. There are of course a small percentage of both left and right handed people who use the mouse with their left hand, but, again, this is an exception, not the norm (and they can of course switch to right click select if they want to). So color me confused, I just don’t get the obsession with right click select, despite using the software for 10+ years now. In fact I put off releasing many man hours of tutorials on the web from when I’ve taught blender, simply because I customize the UI so much and enable addons, including using left click select, I released some in the past, but I took shit from a bunch of people for “not using the defaults”. This seemed silly to me given that one of the best features of blender is it’s customization potential.
Lastly, if left click select effects other tool workflows, then those workflows should be changed to better work with left click select, not the other way around.
krita and gimp have selection tools that activate with left click the same as their other tools.
you don’t have multiple objects to select in painting programs though their workflow is simple enough where that works well.
2.8 has tools set up in a very similar fashion to that now where you select the tool on the toolbar and can activate it then with left click.
BECAUSE OF THIS CHANGE right click select has a stronger argument for being the default than it ever has.
don’t get me wrong, i use the 3d cursor quite a bit but if that’s all the left click does there’s no reason not to have selection on left click.
in 2.8 left click doesn’t just move the 3d cursor.
BECAUSE OF THIS CHANGE left click select now doubles the purpose left click is used for so that it both selects and can also activate the tool. the tool tends to activate when you move the mouse afterwards rather than just a click. essentially this brings the 3d view and modeling workflow capabilities closer in line with things like sculpting and painting. so putting select and tool use on the same mouse button is not good design.
what’s more important for you to have on left click, tool activation or selection? they really don’t work well together unless you’ve got selection tools to pick from for the active tool.
blender does have some selection tools (circle and box select) but having to activate a selection tool for every dang selection would be insane compared to how easily, efficiently, and quickly we do things now. especially considering how different circle and box select act from a normal right click select.
sure in edit mode most of us will be using hotkeys as normal rather than using mouse tools and constantly swapping them. the workflows where this is going to have the most effect are the ones where we’re much more likely to be heavily relying on mouse interaction and what tool we’re using.
you say those workflows should be changed but in all honesty right click select enables a faster more efficient workflow. you’re talking about slowing workflows down heavily because of having to constantly swap tools in order to select and use your mouse tools.
right click select allows you to not have to swap tools when doing things like weight painting in order to select different bones. it can allow you to easily and quickly swap sculpt targets. it can allow you to quickly pick and select faces you want to texture paint on. how do you do any of that near as efficiently with left click select when you’re using left click for your major use tools at the same time?
if you think just because left click select is the standard across all computer use that it should be the norm then you’re holding yourself back. “we should get a menu like everything else on right click even though we’ve got menus everywhere and on several hotkeys already?” yea… that’s efficient use of what we’ve got. lets get yet another menu.
right click select is a fantastic idea and enables better more efficient workflows and more powerful use of the software. it’s actually going to be even more powerful in 2.8 because left click doesn’t only move the 3d cursor around anymore.
the best option to appease left click wanters would be to add a simple select tool to activate on left click while leaving right click select as default.
this also makes the spacebar for the toolbar more powerful and enables quicker interaction and tool swapping for newbies who don’t know the hotkeys for various things yet. double spacebar for search would be very usable for those of us who like search on space too.
Yeah, what he said. I do think that RCS is RCS for valid reasons that help not only speed up, but also facilitate Blender’s work flow. It’s not just a preference, as many people see it, it’s integral to the CLICK FLOW :D
Anything that can be done with a left click, can be integrated as a right click instead. They’re buttons, and they each use one finger, and all they do is activate or deactivate. There is no “inherent efficiency” to clicking with one finger vs. another. The only argument here is how well the “convention” conforms to peoples expectations based on potentially an entire lifetime of computing. All of your arguments can be made the opposite way, and quite frankly we wouldn’t be discussing it had Blender been left click select from the beginning, neither of us would know the difference in that case. Seriously, if you have tool activation or select, or whatever you want on one button, then you can reverse that and it is functionally the same thing…from an efficiency standpoint. In fact, I don’t even know what you are talking about. If I want to weight paint, and move bones, then I’d expect one operation to be left mouse button and to be right, or vice versa, or assigned otherwise, in the end, they both accomplish the same thing, you’re just assuming that, because your’e accustomed to right click being select, that it is the more efficient way, when the program could have been reversed from the start and you’d be arguing the same thing in reverse. It’s a CLICK or necessary series of clicks or button presses either way, both of which your fingers have equal access to. The only inefficiency that can be added with using one key vs. another, such as the keyboard, would be choosing a difficult to access key (like \ or a function key) vs. a typically easier one like (f), or forcing a simple common operation to be multiple keystrokes. Left or right click are equally accessible to the fingers. If you remove a function from one button or hotkey, then you free it up for another function. The ONLY argument to be made here is what the average user “expects” the functionality to be, myself included, again 10+ years of using blender, about 35 of computing, including programming, 3D modeling (solid, polygon and surface), and, like I said, I have yet to see a program that doesn’t use left click as the primary interaction method.
In the end, you can happily switch back to right click select, and deal with what I’ve been doing for 10 years now, meanwhile new users might actually be able to make sense of the program from the start and not be confused and pissed off in the first five seconds of using the program. Tutorial writers will no longer have to say something stupid at the beginning of every tutorial like…”well, you know, I bet you’re confused learner, but stick with it, don’t get frustrated, Blender, unlike every other program you’ve ever used uses “right click” as the primary interaction button. But you see, there’s this very good reason for this, that neither myself or anyone else will be able to logically articulate to you and forget about as we move forward with the lesson…” or “Well the first thing you should do is go to this confusingly place options menu and change select to Left Click, by default.”
Redbeer nope it’s not that i’m simply accustomed to right click select that it’s more efficient now. i pointed out that it didn’t matter much in the 3d view really.
what you and all the left clickers are missing is that the convention isn’t actually “left click select is norm” rather than “left click main action is norm”
it just so happens that for most cases on the computer the main action is going to be selecting thing.
but the main action isn’t always selection and in those cases the thing you do more frequently is what you want on the button you’re most used to using.
there are times when it’s extremely efficient to have select on right click so you don’t have to change tools or anything in order to quickly and easily select things.
if you think about art programs such as photoshop, gimp, krita, painter, or sculpting programs you end up having to change tools if you want to select something and that isn’t the most common thing you do in those programs. it can still be fairly common though.
in blender right click select enables us to quickly move through a workflow with select as a secondary action.
if they just added a simple select tool to the toolbars you guys who want left click would be happy, because you’ll still be using hotkeys to activate your tools like everyone else but you get your left click select where it matters.
us guys who like right click will be happy because it’s honestly better to have right click as select in certain places. we’re still gonna be activating our tools with hotkeys like everyone else as well.
new users get a clearly defined selection tool to easily find.
they’re happy because of that and they get informed by the toolbars at the bottom of 2.8 that they can right click select for more efficient use of the program. without hotkeys they haven’t learned yet.
the right click left click select option gets relegated to editors and modes without toolbars where right or left click select doesn’t actually matter pretty much at all beyond personal preference.
best of all worlds.
left click is for selecting, right click is for contextual menus….
Walls of text displaying incredible feats in mental gymnastics is not going to convince anyone to drop a life time of muscle memory just to appease an incredibly tiny minority of people.
I mean no offense by any of this but these defensive arguments are absolutely ridiculous.
Ok, we can agree to disagree. I don’t agree that having one equally available button do something vs. another adds net efficiency to a workflow, and even if it does, lower accessibility so steeply is a large trade off. Even if I assume that, hypothetically for instance, weight painting, as you mentioned, is more efficient with right click select, is that worth the efficiency if it’s not more efficient in modeling, or any of the other numerous workflows in blender? Selection IS a huge part of all creative workflows, so I fail to see how “maybe” having right click being more efficient on a very specific thing (and I still argue it isn’t) justifies it as the default program wide. I’d really ask you to consider other ways of interaction and how your bias may be affecting your opinion. Perhaps I’m not understanding you as well, can you make or point me to a video that demonstrates why right clicking is so much faster? I do weight paint. Most of the things I do in Blender are for games, so I DO weight paint and rig, but I don’t use the compositor, video editor, or even render very much. I do however, model, sculpt, texture (paint, imported textures, and materials), weight paint, rig, and animate, and have yet to find myself slowed down by switching to left click select, but I may do things differently than you when it comes to weighting.
Rooster Dog
left click is for main action, right click is for secondary action.
that is the muscle memory you’re used to.
you only expect left click to select when the main action you have to do with the mouse is to select.
you don’t expect it to select in a paint program or when sculpting.
it’ not a defensive argument nor is it mental gymnastics.
it’s all fairly simple and laid out if you bother to read it.
it’s some mental gymnastics to think the most efficient use of right click is menus in a program already filled with menus very easily available through simple hotkeys.
Redbeer you seem to be replying to what you assume i have said.
1. i didn’t say right click select was the most efficient everywhere.
2. i did previously say it didn’t really matter much when modeling.
3. i never said it justifies it being the default program wide. i am arguing that dismissing it outright as you left clickers are doing and as you’re accusing me of doing to left click selecting is stupid.
4. it’s not about what’s equally available. it’s about what your main and secondary mouse interactions are in a workflow.
you say you sculpt. i guess you don’t use right click to sculpt and left click to select things there. you say you texture paint, i guess you don’t select things with left click and paint with the right there. i’d also guess you wouldn’t want to in either case because you’re more used to using one button for your main interaction than the other.
5. you say selection is a huge part of creative workflows, i agree but it’s not the creative workflow nor is it always the main thing you’re doing in a creative workflow. this is exactly the reasoning that leads to the thought that having selection easily and readily available as a secondary action when it isn’t the main thing you’re doing is great. as such right click select is great in those instances and is just a setting to adjust to in others. once you adjust it doesn’t really matter either way in the others.
6. i offered a solution that gives the best of both worlds and relegates the left/right select option to places where it actually doesn’t really have pretty much any real meaning. as you incorrectly seem to think is everywhere. yet you continued to argue as if i’m demanding right click select as the defacto best
option for everything.
7. i’d really ask you to consider other ways of interacting, as i have, and consider how your bias may be affecting your opinion.
here’s a few simple questions to help you with that.
what instances in your workflow would you like to be able to keep your mainly mouse interactive tools on hand on left click while still being able to easily and quickly select things rather than having to swap modes and other such pointless tab click tab nonsense just to change what you’ve got selected and are working on?
where would that speed up your workflows a bit and make things a little bit easier?
when you think about left/right click select are you thinking about how things worked in 2.79- or in 2.8+?
Ok so I have proposal for 3d cursor – double middel moue cklick fo this. Amd what with F2 addon? Click extrued?
I always found it incredibly counter intuitive for Blender to deliberately flip the right and left functions of the mouse.
It’s simple:
Left button is for selecting
Right button is for contextual menus
The 3D cursor should be hotkeyed (eg alt+left click).
Blender zealots need to let this go.
Simple ans this!
Yay! At last!
Now we just gotta get Y-up in there so the viewport matches all 2D areas of the software.
Not to mention matching the real world where we rarely look at things from a bird’s eye view.
Indeed!!
Taking advantage of your comment, I will say that one day (one day…) I want to see Blender asks: “do you want to save your work before close?” when you switch to another .blend file or when you close Blender. It will be a Revolution. Can you imagine this? A software so sophisticated that it asks you this!! Wow!!
_________________
PS.: When I type Ctrl+S, Blender asks if I really want to save my work. What the hack!! If I typed Ctrl+S is obvious that I want to save my work!! Blender doesn’t like users that want to save their works? Is that the case?
I actually rewrote that dialog to add the behaviour you’re describing and submitted a patch. Whether or not it makes it into trunk is a whole other story, though.
Still, it was fun to exercise my coding skills again after so many years. :)
Well, Ron, if they don’t put it in Blender trunk, you can sell this code in Blender Market or in your own site. I’m ready to pay for this!!
LOL! That would be good if it were possible. Unfortunately, selling a patch wouldn’t really work. It’s written in C (or maybe it was C++) so the only way to get it into your copy would be to compile the entire application which is beyond the average user.
Sorry about that. If it were possible to do in Python, I would have.
What I could do, I suppose, if it doesn’t make it in, I could put it up on graphicall.org so people can grab it there.
How about we wait and see what the devs do and then revisit this?
Thank you for your answer, Ron.
Yes, lets wait to see. I have hope!!
I’ve just realised that I am in (possibly) an even smaller minority (you’ll have to let me know…) in the fact that I use Blender exclusively with a graphics tablet – I’m sure there are many more out there – but have now realised that this is why RCS makes so much more sense to me (us?). With a pen, you hover over what you want to select, then, instead of stabbing down to select, I click the top button on the pen, which is set to right click. For me, that’s totally comfortable and logical – I then stop hovering and put the pen to the tablet and start doing whatever I’m doing to whatever I’ve just selected. I guess I’ll butt out of the thread now and let the argument rage on, because I’m not a mouse user!
Literally, I can’t do anything with a mouse these days. If you asked me to use even Blender for 10 minutes with a mouse, I’d have an actual meltdown.
Anyway, is anyone else regretting having email notifications turned on for this thread?!
The biggest detriment to creativity is having to stop and think about how to use the tools.
What happened Ton always fiercely defended right click select. Just a thought.
My perception is: Ton has his points, but he’s not a dictatorship. Au contraire: he is a democratic person that hears the community and the developers.
OK guys, real world example here, some help if you could, please?
How do I select a loop with LCS ?
In RCS, I hold alt and RCS and a loop is selected.
I’m trying LCS in 2.80 and actually happy so far, apart from this loop selecting problem.
Any ideas?
Cheers
Wayne
SLOWMO75
looks like it’s double click.
you can use the search function to find hotkey for things. (loop select)
Alt + LCS is working for me. But you can try Shift + Alt + LCS. I’m used to it because under Linux this was always the combination that works.
Thanks both – Double works for me, Shit Alt LC doesn’t – think I’d prefer that, not too sure about double click.
Got a strange dilemma about how long to fight my muscle memory – do I just give in and start reverting shortcuts now, or do I wait and potentially leave it too late and my new muscle memory becomes stronger and battles the old one!?
This has to have generated the longest response ever. ;) Honestly totally fine either way. Looking forward to learning the new snazzy workflows. It’s like a new adventure!
OK, so that didn’t take long, I’ve made my decision, and I’m sticking with right click. I’ve tried left for a few hours and have come to this conclusion…
Blender is incredibly customisable, probably more so than the vast majority of packages out there, so I’m just going to make it do whatever the F I want it do and I’m going to make it do it however the F I want it to do it – I mean, I have been doing that for years anyway, most of us here have, so let’s just keep doing that anyway shall we?
My keyboard shortcuts are changed beyond all recognition and I’m sure most of yours are too, so let’s just get on with it and do what we’ve all been doing for years – making Blender work our way.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, RCS works for me specifically because I have it on the button of a Wacom pen, so LCS just doesn’t feel right to me, and I’ve finally realised that that’s just fine :]
Hi,
while I still consider giving some chances to this new approach, and precisely in order to do this with fair knowledge on what and why, I would like to know whether in LCS is considered the option of moving objects, vertices and so on by a single operation of selecting&moving that was possible with RCS.
If not, I would like to know the alternative approaches that could deliver the same efficiency or, at least, which other approaches possible with LCS in other areas of Blender are now possible that compensate for the eventual loss of efficiency in this area.
Thanks!
Raimon