Using Keyboard Layout Emulation

Ensure you have installed the extension.

Navigate to Preferences > Keymap. You should see a bar on top of the keymap preset selector with two keyboard layout selectors, which default to QWERTY, followed by an Apply and a Revert button.

There is also a gear button on the right end of the bar to reveal the keyboard layout emulation preferences.

Quick Setup

Setup in 3 clicks

1. Choose your preferred keyboard layout in the center dropdown menu.
2. Press the Apply button.
3. Observe how all the keyboard layouts below have been remapped accordingly. They will remain remapped until you press the Revert button again or disable/uninstall the extension.

If you cannot find your preferred keyboard layout in the dropdown, you may also define your own

User Interface

Target keyboard layout selector

The leftmost dropdown in the top bar lets you choose a target keyboard layout.

For most purposes, this should be left as QWERTY.

This should be set to match the keyboard layout for which the keymap preset you are remapping was designed for.

To avoid an easy beginner mistake, this field is locked by default. You can enable it in the preferences.

Input keyboard layout selector

The second dropdown in the top bar lets you choose your input keyboard layout.

This is where you choose your preferred keyboard layout.

This value will be used to determine how the keyboard shortcuts should be remapped so that your input is interpreted as if it was typed on the target layout rather than your actual layout.

Keyboard layout editor

Besides the input keyboard layout selector, there are + and - buttons, and a pencil button. These let you define your own keyboard layouts and edit them. Press the pencil button to reveal the keyboard layout editor.

No, I do not use the Spanish Dvorak layout, it's just a convenient example.

How can I edit a built-in layout?

Built-in layouts cannot be edited. Create a copy using the + button, and give it a different name before editing it.

In the keyboard layout editor, press any key and subsequently type the key it should correspond to on your layout to reassign it. Press Escape or click anywhere to cancel reassigning a key. Changes are immediately saved in the selected layout.

Tip

You may also use the Import layout... and Export layout... buttons to import or export keyboard layouts as simple JSON files containing a mapping of characters.

See more on defining your own keyboard layout

Applying and Reverting keyboard layout emulation

The Apply button enables keyboard layout emulation.

The emulation remaps all your keyboard shortcuts in a way that pressing the corresponding QWERTY shortcut on your non-QWERTY keyboard layout still triggers the action designed for QWERTY layouts (e.g., pressing O in Dvorak will trigger S (Scale)).

Info

This will not affect the text you input in properties, search fields nor the text editor, so you can still type on your preferred keyboard layout.

Under the hood this is not a simple apply and forget operation

Once applied, the extension will remember this and reapply the remapping every time you restart Blender, open a new file, or install a new extension. This is necessary to ensure that keyboard shortcuts defined by other extensions are also reliably remapped. The performance impact of reapplying emulation is usually imperceptible.

Every remapped shortcut is remembered by the extension to avoid remapping the same shortcut twice over, as well as to ensure that we can reliably revert the remapping. The journal of remapped shortcuts is reasonably compressed and, for a factory Blender installation is usually under 100 KiB in size.

The extension tries to ensure that you'll never have to worry about it until you want to make changes to your keymap.

The Revert button reverts the remapping, until you apply it again.

Gotchas

There are a few shortcuts (e.g., Node Editor (Global) > Duplicate) that experience glitches in Blender, even if you remap them yourself as a user.

You may notice that when you revert emulation, these shortcuts may appear as if they were still modified, but if you inspect them closely, you will observe that they have been properly reverted. This appears to be a bug in Blender in the process of comparing these shortcuts to their default values.