Quick Workspace Toggle

by young in Addons


When working on my laptop, with limited screen real estate, often I need to drag out different windows such as UV editor, Asset browser. With the introduction of workspace, it greatly improves the workflow. Quick Workspace Toggle takes it a step further by combine toggle functionality with pie menu and/or keyboard shortcuts.


basic steps:

  1. Setup a few workspaces that fit your needs.

  2. Setup shortcuts for pie menu and/or hotkeys in add-on tab.

  3. Optionally, define a main workspace.

  4. Use pie menu and/or hotkeys to toggle between workspaces.


    please note: this addon support max of 8 workspaces show in the preference panel. larger than that, such as workspace 9 will be ignored. their order are based on numeric and alphabetic order, so you can rename them to reorder the position in the list. for example, "0 UV Edit" ( start with 0 ) will always above "3 texture painting" ( start with 3 ), "emma geo node" ( start with 'e' ) will always above "freddie assets" ( start with 'f' ). the workspaces 1 to 8 correspond to pie menu positions as follows: 1 left, 2 right, 3 bottom, 4 top, 5 top-left, 6 top-right, 7 bottom-left, 8 bottom-right.


    detailed instruction for single keyboard shortcut (similar with pie hotkey):

    1 open blender preference and install the zip file in addon tab.


    2 the add on supports max of 8 workspaces. although there are 11 workspaces in default blender start file, a max of first 8 can be configured.



    3 let's say you want to toggle between "Layout" and "Geometry Nodes" and bind it to keyboard "Shift + 9"


    4 first, I type "Layout" in the main_workspace area, then the "Geometry Nodes" workspace corresponds to workspace 3, so I activate Toggle Workspace 3 and assign hotkey "Shift + 9"



    5 now close the preference window, press shift +9, it will toggle between those two workspaces.


    6 you can re-arrange the workspace order by adding a number in front. for example, I want to toggle the "UV Editing". it was at workspace 11 as shown in default blender start up


    I can double click the workspace tab and rename it to "0 UV Editing", now it is at workspace 1.


    remember to save as start up blend files after you set them up.

    7 you may encounter conflict hotkeys when other operators use the same keyboard button.

    for example, "1" generally used to switch to vertex mode. If I assign hotkey 1 to toggle workspaces it will not work.
    open preference-Keymap-Keybinding and type "1" you will see all the operators that use key "1"

    you can either choose a different key for the toggle or de-activate other operators using the key, so that there is no hotkey conflict. 


      *****************Update********************


      update 1.1:

      added: custom name filter to show selected workspaces in pie menu, button toggles will not be effected by the filter.

      if the "workspace_filter" is left empty, all available workspaces up to 8 will show up in pie menu as show in the picture below. 

      if text case sensitive ) is entered, it will filter through the available workspaces and only show workspaces that include it. for example, I enter "Danny" as shown below, the filter will ignore all rest, thus, pie menu will only include that inside the yellow mark, they are effectively in list 1 to 4 and appear in pie menu position as left, right, bottom, top.


      Sales 50+
      Customer Ratings 3
      Average Rating
      Published almost 3 years ago
      Blender Version 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.0, 2.93
      License GPL
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