Keymap Visualizer

Warning!

Back up your Blender preferences before using this add-on. Keymaps are sensitive user data and Blender provides limited safeguards around them. This add-on edits your keymaps in place — there is a real possibility of keymap loss or corruption, with no guaranteed way for users to restore them from within Blender. Before using this add-on, copy your userpref.blend (and any keyconfig files) from your Blender config folder so you can roll back if anything goes wrong.

What it does

Blender's shortcut system is powerful, but the built-in keymap editor makes you dig through nested menus to find anything. Keymap Visualizer shows you the whole keyboard on one screen: every shortcut on every key, color-coded, searchable, rebindable with a right-click.

• Hover a key — the info panel shows what's bound to it
• Left-click — lock the info panel to that key
• Right-click — rebind, unbind, reset to default, or toggle a binding on/off
• Press ? then any shortcut — the visualizer jumps to the key that owns it
• Press / — search operators by name; matching keys stay bright, others dim
• Press D — compare against Blender defaults (green = modified, red = deactivated)
• Press Ctrl+Z — undo (up to 50 levels)

Features

Visual keyboard

• GPU-rendered with drop shadows and smooth hover animations
• 6 sizes: 100% full, 96% compact, 80% TKL, 75%, 65%, 60%
• 2 physical layouts: ANSI or ISO
• 7 logical layouts: auto-detect, QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Dvorak, Colemak, Nordic
• Resizable 0.5×–3×
• All sections: alphanumeric, numpad, function row, navigation cluster, and mouse buttons

Rebinding

• Right-click any key to list its bindings, pick one, press a new combo
• Capture mode dims everything except the target key and prompts for a combo
• Conflict resolution with Swap / Override / Cancel options
• Undo up to 50 levels

Search

• Operator search by name (/ or Ctrl+F) with fuzzy matching
• Reverse shortcut lookup (?) — press a combo to find the key
• Operator browser on the left with 13 categories and a blue dot indicator for bound operators

Filters

• Editor filter (3D View, UV, Node, Text, Sequencer, Clip, Dopesheet, Graph, NLA, Properties, Outliner, Console, Spreadsheet, Global)
• Mode filter (Object, Edit Mesh, Sculpt, Pose, Weight Paint, Vertex Paint, Texture Paint, Grease Pencil, Curves)
• Multi-select, any combination

Presets, import, export

• Save whole keyconfig as a JSON preset. Load, delete, copy to clipboard, paste from clipboard. Presets save to your Blender user config folder by default; configurable in addon preferences.
• Export / Import .py keyconfigs to a path of your choice (defaults to your Blender user config folder).

Diff view

• Press D to see what you've changed from defaults
• Green = modified, Red = deactivated, Dim = untouched

Theming

• 8 base color tokens drive all derived colors
• 13 individually configurable category colors
• 29 advanced per-element color overrides (collapsed by default)
• WCAG-aware adaptive text contrast

Accessibility

• Full keyboard-only navigation (Tab to cycle focus, arrows to move, Enter to select)
• Focus ring on the currently selected key

Requires

Blender 5.1 or newer.

How to open

Edit → Keymap Viz in the top menu bar. A new window opens with the keyboard overlay.

A note on how this was built

Full disclosure: this add-on was "vibecoded" — written primarily through AI pair-programming with Claude Code rather than line-by-line by hand. Every file has been read, tested in Blender 5.1, and shaped by a human (me) making the design calls, but the bulk of the implementation was AI-assisted. Flagging it so the review lens is calibrated accordingly; happy to dig into any section that warrants closer inspection.