as I need them.
Duplicating an area to a new window
In addition to splitting and joining areas, you can use an area’s corner widgets to duplicate that area into a new Blender window of its own. You can move that window to a separate monitor (if you have one), or it can overlap your original Blender window. And within this new Blender window, you can split the duplicated area into additional ones as you like. This area-duplication feature is a slight violation of Blender’s non-overlapping principles, but the benefits it provides for users with multiple computer screens make it very worthwhile.
To take advantage of this feature, follow these steps:
1 Shift+left-click one of the corner widgets in an area and drag your mouse cursor away from it in any direction.This step duplicates the area you clicked in and creates a new Blender window to contain it. You can also achieve this effect from the header menu of some editors by choosing View ⇒ Area ⇒ Duplicate Area into New Window.
2 Close the additional Blender window by clicking the close button that your operating system adds to the border of the window.
Maximizing an area
When working in Blender, you also occasionally need to maximize an area. Maximizing an area is particularly useful when you’re working on a model or scene, and you just want to get all the other areas out of your way so you can use as much screen space as possible for the task at hand.
To maximize any area, hover your mouse cursor over it and press Ctrl+Spacebar. You can toggle back to the tiled screen layout by either pressing Ctrl+Spacebar again or clicking the Back to Previous button at the top of the window. These options are available in the header menus of nearly all editor types by choosing View ⇒ Area ⇒ Toggle Maximize Area. You can also right-click the header and choose Maximize Area from the menu that appears. If the area is already maximized, then the menu item will say Tile Area.
CUSTOMIZING HEADERS
All editors in Blender have a horizontal region called the header that usually runs along the top of the editor. The header usually features specialized menus or buttons specific to the editor you’re using. Here are some ways you can customize the header:
Hide the header. If you right-click the header, you get a menu with the Show Header check box that you can use to toggle the visibility of the header. When the header is hidden, you’re left with only a small down-arrow icon in the right corner of the editor. If the header is at the bottom of the editor, the arrow icon points up and appears at the bottom right of the editor. Left-click this icon and the header reappears.
Scroll the header’s menus. There will be occasions while working that you make an area too narrow to show all the menus and buttons in it. No worries. All headers in all of Blender’s editors are scrollable. If you have a narrow area where parts of the header are obscured, hover your mouse cursor over the header and scroll your mouse wheel to slide the contents of the header left and right. You could also middle-click and drag the header to do the same thing.
Hide menus in the header. Of course, maybe you don’t want to be constantly scrolling the contents of your header. You’d rather just save space by hiding the menus. Right-click the header and toggle the Show Menus option to collapse the menus for that header down to a single button with an icon of three lines (sometimes called a hamburger menu).
Change the location of the header. You can also change the location of the header to either the top or bottom of the editor it belongs to. To do so, right-click the header and choose Flip to Top (or Bottom, depending on where your header currently is).
Hide or show Tool Settings. This one is specific to the 3D Viewport. If you right-click the header for the 3D Viewport, there’s an additional check box that you can use to toggle the visibility for settings on your active tool and regain a bit of screen real estate.
The menu that is a pie
Each menu item has a much larger click area. With a typical list-type menu, after you find the menu item you want, you need to precisely click a relatively small area. Having a small click area can be especially frustrating if your primary input is with a pen tablet like many artists have. With a pie menu, you need only to have your mouse cursor in the general area around your menu selection (its slice of the pie). Because you don’t need to be as precise with your mouse, you can navigate menus faster with less stress on your hand.
Menu options are easier to remember. As humans, we tend to naturally think about things spatially. It’s much easier to remember that a thing is up or left or right than to remember that it’s the sixth item in a list of things. Because the menu items are arranged in two-dimensional space, pie menus take advantage of our natural way of recalling information. Also helpful for memory is the fact that any given pie menu can only have as many as eight options.
Selecting menu items is a gestural behavior. A gestural interface relies on using mouse movement to issue a command. Pie menus are not purely gestural, but by arranging the menu items spatially, you get many of the same advantages provided by gestures. Most valuable among these advantages is the reliance on muscle memory. After working with a pie menu for an extended period of time, selecting menu items becomes nearly as fast as using hotkeys, and for essentially the same reasons. You’re no longer thinking about the direction you’re moving your mouse cursor (or which key you’re pressing). You’ve trained your hands to move in a specific way when you want to perform that task. Once you get to that point (it doesn’t take very long), you’ll find that you’re working very quickly.
Pie menus are basically limited to a maximum of eight menu items. (It’s possible to have more items, but if a pie menu has more than eight items, it becomes cluttered and the speed and memory advantages of pie menus are lessened.) Blender has a number of very long menus; therefore, they don’t all translate nicely to the pie menu model. This means that some menus will be pies and others will not. Hopefully, as development continues on Blender, these menus will migrate to being more pie-like.
Some pie menus aren’t enabled by default. A number of hotkeys are bound to pie menus already, but you can enable even more as add-ons from Preferences. (Read more about Blender add-ons in Chapter 2.)
