Managing Areas

As you’ve seen already, Blender’s UI is made of areas or frames. Let’s master them! First, you’ll learn how to split and join them: the key to performing these operations is in the bottom-left and top-right corners. Each area will have little diagonal lines in those corners that you can click and drag. When you hover the mouse over them, your cursor will turn into a cross.

You can work with those corners in the following ways:

Split: Click LMB and drag inside an area to split it. Dragging vertically will create a horizontal split, while dragging horizontally will create a vertical split. Right click before releasing LMB to cancel splitting (see Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.6 Splitting and joining areas

Join: Click and drag an area’s corner toward a contiguous area and that area will darken and show an arrow that displays the direction in which the areas will be joined. The area from which you’ve dragged will now take the space of the area into which you dragged. Keep in mind you’ll only be able to join areas with contiguous borders of a similar size. Right click before releasing LMB to cancel joining (see Figure 2.6).

Swap: Press Ctrl + LMB in one of these corners and drag over a different area. The editors inside those areas will be swapped.

Duplicate: Press Shift + LMB and drag in the corner. The area will be duplicated in a new window, which is useful if you are using a second monitor.

Full Screen: Hover the cursor over an area and press Shift + Space or Ctrl + UpArrow. That area will appear in full screen to give you more space to work. Press one of those shortcuts again to return to the original workspace.

Resize: Hover the cursor over the borders of an area. The cursor will become a two-headed arrow. Click and drag to resize that area.