style="font-size:15px;"> Middle-click the header and drag your mouse left and right.The contents of the header move left and right so that you can bring those obscured buttons into view. I personally like this approach because it feels more direct.
Setting user preferences
blenderbasics.com) for setting some of the most useful and relevant options in the Preferences editor. For specific details on every single button, see the online documentation available at https://docs.blender.org/manual.
Of course, the first question is, “Where exactly are the controls for user preferences?” Well, the Preferences editor is just like any other editor in Blender and can, therefore, appear in any area you want it to by using the Editor Type menu in the header region of any editor. (For more information, see the section “Looking at Editor Types,” earlier in this chapter.) Of course, you can also choose Edit ⇒ Preferences, and Blender creates a new window just for the Preferences editor. Although creating a separate window is a bit of a violation of Blenders non-overlapping philosophy, it is sometimes nicer because you don’t have to replace or split any of your existing areas to get a Preferences editor. Also, it’s unlikely that you’ll be modifying your preferences frequently while working on a Blender project, so the chances are low that this overlapping window will get in your way.
Using custom event maps
Blender has one of the most customizable event systems of any application I’ve worked with. An event system is required for a complex program to interact with you and me, the users. Each time you press a button or move your mouse, it registers with the program as an event. The program then handles the event by performing an action of some sort. As an example, moving your mouse registers as an event, which then triggers your computer to perform the action of updating the location of the mouse cursor on your monitor.
Blender provides you the ability to customize the event system to suit your needs, mapping events to a wide variety of possible Blender operations. Don’t like using a particular hotkey in Blender’s default configuration? You’re free to change it. And that’s just the start!
The majority of the Keymap section in Preferences (Edit ⇒ Preferences) is devoted to modifying how events are handled within Blender. This list of events is particularly daunting to look at, and you can easily get lost among all those expanding and collapsing categories of events. Fortunately, you can modify how events are handled in a much easier way, and you don’t even have to use the Preferences editor if you don’t want to. Instead, you can follow these steps:
1 Find the operator you want to bind in Blender’s menu system.As mentioned earlier in this chapter, an operator is a thing that Blender does; it’s the thing that happens when you click a menu item in Blender’s interface. As an example, say that you want to change the hotkey for saving a project from Ctrl+S (the current hotkey) to Ctrl+W, the hotkey used in older versions of Blender. You can find this operator by going to the menus at the top of your Blender window and choosing File ⇒ Save. Go to that menu item, but don’t click it yet. Just hover your mouse cursor over it and proceed to the next step.
2 Right-click the menu item for the operator and choose Change Shortcut from the menu that appears.In this example, choose File ⇒ Save, right-click it, and choose Change Shortcut. Blender prompts you for a new hotkey.
3 When prompted, use the new hotkey that you want to assign to the operation.In this case, you press Ctrl+W.Congratulations! Your new hotkey is assigned!
Figure 2-14 shows this process in action.
FIGURE 2-14: Customizing a hotkey sequence directly from Blender’s menus.
1 In the search filter field, type all or part of the operator you want to customize and press Enter.The listing below updates with Blender’s best guesses for the operator you’re looking for. Alternatively, you can just drill down through the categories until you find the event you want. Using the previous example, you might type “save” in this field to find the Save Blender File operator. If you don’t know the name of the operator, you can search by the hotkey it uses. Left-click the drop-down menu to the left of the search filter field. You can choose between Name (the default) to search by operator name or Key-Binding to search by hotkey.
2 Modify the event you want to change.Changing an actual event is much like the process used to add hotkeys to menu items. It works like so:Use the Type of Event Mapping drop-down menu displayed to the right or the operation name to stipulate whether the event is coming from a keyboard, mouse, text input, or some other source. For example, if you’re adjusting a hotkey, make sure that you’ve set it to Keyboard.Left-click the Type of Event field that comes after the Type of Event Mapping menu. It will either be blank or already have an event in it. Upon doing so, Blender prompts
