This has been bugging me for a long time, and I wonder if other people just deal with it, or know of a better way around it.
Because Unreal is such a massive set of tools and windows, hotkeys need the user to click in a panel like the viewport to make it active - for something like toggling Game mode, click in the active view port and tap “G”.
The issue is that whatever is selected before activating that viewport is lost, and something else will end up being selected.
It very common that I have one viewport for the camera perspective and one user perspective. Very commonly, I need to toggle lighting modes, game mode, focus on something, etc. and I need to tell Unreal which panel I want that to be done in.
Ideally, I could set focus to a viewport with a uI toggle, and no matter if I’ve selected things in the outliner, or sequencer, or even a material view, the selected Viewport would receive the hotkey command.
This a very common issue with the Sequenceer, when using hotkeys don’t work until the Sequencer window is set to focus, thus removing a sometimes delicate selection set.
So, is there any way to tell Unreal, no matter the focused panel, hotkeys affect the designated panel?
Another good case for this is the QWER hotkeys, I don’t care what panel has focus - hitting these keys seems like they should always change the gizmo mode - If I need to click in the viewport to focus it, often the selection is lost.
Obviously, there are hotkeys specific to each panel, and the current implementation avoids conflicts. Issue is that many of these conflicting hotkeys won’t affect most users.