Free Hinge Extrude Extension
Hinge Extrude is a free Blender extension that lets you extrude faces around an active edge in just a couple of clicks, eliminating a clunky multi step process.
Johnny Matthews writes:
In this Blender tutorial, I introduce Hinge Extrude, a free Blender extension I built to make edge based extrusion fast, clean, and intuitive for modeling. I walk through how to install the extension from my personal Blender extensions repository and show how Hinge Extrude lets you extrude faces around an active edge in just a couple of clicks, eliminating the clunky multi step process Blender users are used to. This tool is inspired by a classic Maya feature and brings a powerful modeling workflow directly into Blender.
Thanks for this. Ever since I switched form 3dsMax I missed this function. I even have a suggestion if you plan to make it interactive. An smoother interaction would be to select faces to extrude, activate the operator, then just hover the intended hinge edge (possibly using a highlight) and finally click-drag. I believe this could work with face mode only active, similar to snap overlays that show regardless of the selection mode.