Unbinding 'Z' key

I thinks it's under the "Others" category.

Ken

This is one you probably DON't want to mess with. Not because it will screw up SW but because it is historically mapped to the functions you mentioned. If you ever need help from someone or try to help someone out having Z (or other "historical" keys) mapped to other things, it will cause needless confusion.

And besides that don't you think Z is a good mnemonic for Zoom along with it's brother Shift Z? On the other hand I always thought Undo should have been U and not CTRL Z.

Speaking of which, how do you unmap the mousewheel from Z and Shift+Z? :)

All kidding aside, I zoom with the mousewheel. Z is superfluous. I can think of reasons and situations where this won't work, but none of them apply. I use Zoom to Selection quite a bit to nail down the view rotation center. I also use it to hop straight to the next broken mate. Something I'm doing way too much of, but that's a different story (for which I despair a happy ending). Anyway, I don't use Z. I want to map Zoom to Selection to Z. That's pretty mnemonic, too. Much more so than Alt-Ctrl-Z, and much less likely to cause carpal tunnel problems. Mostly because me mates are all busted all the time.

Have you ever wondered about Ctrl+Y?

For what you are doing I map Q to zoom to selection, W to zoom to window and D to rotate. While Q is not much of mnemonic, W is. And if you look at where your left hand's fingers fall while the right hand is on the mouse you will see that there is very little finger motion needed to get at the most used zoom commands.

You might ask why D is mapped to rotate instead of letting the mouse do that. Simple, when the rotate command is active I can pick a point to rotate about when in an assembly.

Mike Young wrote: ...snip

Does that work in more cases than selecting a rotation center with the MMB for MMB rutation?

It works the same way but with the LMB. I never could get a consistent double-click with the MMB, even with it mapped to a thumb button on the mouse.

You only need a single middle-click. The major drawback is that it doesn't work when editing a sketch in-context.

It doesn't work when editing a sketch period. It has nothing to do with the sketch being in-context or not. At least that is the way it has always worked up to SW2005 SP3.0 (what I am currently using).

Interesting that I never noticed in working in a part. I guess I never use it there.