I did not set out to build a Blender addon. That was not the plan at all.
For the past few years I have been teaching animation and helping people get started with Blender through tutorials and courses. And one thing I kept seeing over and over was people quitting. Not because they could not understand 3D concepts. Not because they lacked creativity or patience. They quit because the keyboard kept beating them.
Blender has a reputation. Ask anyone who tried to learn it and did not stick with it, and nine times out of ten the story involves opening the software, pressing the wrong key, something going wrong, not knowing how to fix it, and eventually closing the window out of frustration. The shortcuts are genuinely overwhelming when you have no visual reference for what is available.
I used to tell beginners to print a cheat sheet. Tape it next to your monitor. Refer to it when you get stuck. And some people did that, and it helped a little. But it always felt like a workaround rather than a real solution. Your eyes are over here on the screen, the cheat sheet is over there on the wall, and every time you look away you lose context. The flow breaks. The frustration builds.
What I really wanted was something that lived inside Blender itself. Something that showed you the shortcuts right there in your viewport, updating as you switched modes, highlighting as you pressed keys, showing modifier combinations when you held Shift or Ctrl. So you never had to look away. So the learning happened inside the actual work.
That is what I built with HotkeyBoard.
HotkeyBoard is available now on Superhive Market and Gumroad. It supports Blender 4.5 and later.
It was not a quick thing to make. Mapping out 750 plus shortcuts across 8 different Blender modes, building the color coding system so beginners know which keys to learn first versus which ones can wait, making sure it updates correctly when you jump from Object mode to Sculpt mode mid-session. There were a lot of details to get right.
The color system was something I thought about carefully. Blue for the primary shortcuts, the ones every beginner needs on day one like G, R, S, Tab, A. Green for the next layer. Orange for more specialized stuff. Purple for modifiers. Yellow highlights whatever you are pressing in real time. The idea was to give beginners a visual priority map, not just a list of every key that does something. Because dumping 750 shortcuts on someone all at once is just a different kind of overwhelming.
The modifier combinations were the part I felt most strongly about. Ctrl B for bevel, Alt S for shrink, Shift D to duplicate. These are shortcuts that experienced Blender users use constantly but beginners discover almost by accident. By making them visible the moment you hold a modifier key, I wanted to remove that luck element from the discovery process.
I have seen what happens when a beginner finally gets their shortcuts into muscle memory. The whole experience of Blender changes. They stop fighting the software and start actually making things. That transition is what HotkeyBoard is meant to accelerate.
If you are building something in Blender and shortcuts are still slowing you down, you can check out HotkeyBoard on Superhive Market. It supports Blender 4.5 and is already ready for 5.0. And if you have questions about it or want to know more about how it works, feel free to reach out through the contact page.
If you are working in Blender and shortcuts are slowing you down, check out HotkeyBoard. It is a live interactive keyboard overlay addon built for exactly this problem.
