Keyboard Shortcuts

See also

For the foundational Blender shortcuts (navigation, selection, transform, edit mode, loop cut, extrude, knife, duplicate, parameters panel, modifiers, render) — see the Golden Twelve card admonition below. The EM-Tools-specific shortcuts on this page are composed on top of the Golden Twelve.

Recommended prerequisite — The Golden Twelve

Before you author proxies, build LOD geometry, or work with semantic shapes in Blender, make sure you have the foundational shortcut grammar fluent. The Golden Twelve is a two-page reference card covering the twelve keyboard-shortcut command families that appear in every EM modelling workflow — navigation, selection, add & position, transform, edit mode, extrude, loop cut, knife, duplicate, parameters panel, modifiers, render. The shortcuts have been stable since Blender 1.0 (1995), so the skill survives every future Blender release.

Cite as: Demetrescu, E. (2026). The Golden Twelve: Reference Card for 3D Cultural Heritage Modelling (v1.0). Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.21068528 (CC-BY-SA 4.0). A companion paper is in submission to Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage.

EMtools provides keyboard shortcuts for common operations in the 3D Viewport. All shortcuts are context-aware and only work when relevant data is available.

Table 1 Available Shortcuts

Shortcut

Action

Description

SHIFT+F5 (Win/Linux) FN+SHIFT+F5 (macOS)

Reload GraphML

Reloads the active GraphML file from disk

Option+F (macOS) Alt+F (Win/Linux)

Select List Item

Selects the list element corresponding to the active 3D proxy

Note

More shortcuts will be added in future versions. The system is designed to be easily expandable.