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PickWalk

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Ingo Clemens edited this page Nov 24, 2025 · 8 revisions

Usage

PickWalk adds the ability to navigate a hierarchy with custom keymaps to quickly select parent objects or children or switch to child siblings. Current selections can be expanded, and it's possible to jump to the same object on the opposite side based on a side identifier.

Pickwalking also works in edit mode with mesh and curve objects to quickly navigate to the next point connected to the current selection.

Keymaps are registered for the 3D view, Outliner, Graph Editor and Dope Sheet.

  • The Ctrl/Cmd key is used as a general modifier to access the pickwalking.
  • The Shift key expands the current selection.
  • The Alt key tries to find the same object on the opposite side of the hierarchy based on a side identifier.

Keymaps

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Up Arrow: Select parent

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Down Arrow: Select Child

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Right Arrow: Select Next Child Sibling

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Left Arrow: Select Previous Child Sibling

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Arrow Key: Keep the current selection and add the parent or child.

  • Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + Left/Right Arrow: Select Opposite. When in mesh edit mode it cycles through the connected vertices.

Note for macOS users

On macOS, the key combination Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow is reserved by the operating system for system-wide text navigation. Because these shortcuts are intercepted at the OS level, Blender cannot reliably detect or use them in its own keymap. As a result, this combination appears not to be recognized within Blender. For consistency, the Cmd key is used instead, and the equivalent shortcut becomes Cmd + Left/Right Arrow on macOS.

Side Identifiers

The default side identifiers recognised are:

left/right, lft/rgt, lt/rt, lf/rg, l/r

Identifiers can be used as a prefix (i.e. left_), suffix (i.e. _left) or embedded (i.e. _left_).

Identifiers can also be written in just lowercase (i.e. left), only uppercase (i.e. LEFT) or capitalised (i.e. Left).

Identifiers can either use underscore '_' or period '.' separators.

Components

Pickwalking can be used in Edit Mode for mesh and curve objects to navigate between vertices and curve points.

Mesh

Mesh vertex navigation is based on the screen direction and therefore is influenced by the view direction. If a vertex cannnot be assigned to one of the four available directions it cannot be selected. This is the case when more than four vertices/edges are connected to one vertex.

To access all connected vertices of a vertex use Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + Left/Right Arrow to cycle between these.

When pickwalking between vertices of a set of extruded edges you can use Ctrl/Cmd + Up/Right to select the next vertex and Ctrl/Cmd + Down/Left to select the previous vertex.

Curve

When pickwalking between points of a curve you can use Ctrl/Cmd + Up/Right to select the next vertex and Ctrl/Cmd + Down/Left to select the previous vertex. When reaching the last/first point the selection wraps and the first/last point is selected respectively.

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