Property Tabs - Menu (Custom Hotkeys)

Question

There are 14? property tabs that allow you to enter into such things as the Material properties, modifiers properties etc.

My question, is it possible to create a custom hotkey or script that can select that window (instead of clicking it)? I mainly use Materials, Modifiers. I would like to set a hotkey to access these faster when an object is selected.

Creating a custom hotkey just opens this menu, not really what I'm after.

Let's pretend I press 1 on the keyboard, Materials Property would open up. Or if I called via a pie menu through an operator. Hope the explains what I'm after.

Answer 1

You can copy paste this into Blender's text editor and save it as a .py file and install it as an add-on to have an operator that switches all Properties editors to some tab:

import bpy

bl_info = {
    "name": "Properties Tab Switch",
    "author": "Martynas Žiemys",
    "version": (1, 0),
    "blender": (4, 0, 2),
    "location": "Search -> Properties Tab Switch",
    "description": "Properties Tab Switch",
    "warning": "",
    "doc_url": "",
    "category": "UI",
}

class PropertiesTabSwitch(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Tooltip"""
    bl_idname = "wm.properties_tab_switch"
    bl_label = "Properties Tab Switch"
    bl_options = {'REGISTER', 'UNDO'}
    
    tab : bpy.props.StringProperty(
        name="Tab",
        default='MATERIAL')
        # ('TOOL', 'RENDER', 'OUTPUT', 'VIEW_LAYER', 'SCENE', 'WORLD', 'OBJECT', 'MODIFIER', 'PARTICLES', 'PHYSICS', 'CONSTRAINT', 'DATA', 'MATERIAL', 'TEXTURE')
#    @classmethod
#    def poll(cls, context):
#        return True

    def execute(self, context):
        for area in context.screen.areas: 
            if area.type=='PROPERTIES':
                try:
                    area.spaces[0].context = self.tab
                except:
                    self.report({'WARNING'}, "Cannot switch to " + self.tab + " tab")
        return {'FINISHED'}


def register():
    bpy.utils.register_class(PropertiesTabSwitch)


def unregister():
    bpy.utils.unregister_class(PropertiesTabSwitch)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    register()

Once it's enabled, you can add a hot-key calling the operator in the Preferences( F4 -> P ), Keymap tab:

The operator you want to add is called wm.properties_tab_switch. You probably want to add it the whole window:

Then you can change the property called "Tab" to whatever you want ('TOOL', 'RENDER', 'OUTPUT', 'VIEW_LAYER', 'SCENE', 'WORLD', 'OBJECT', 'MODIFIER', 'PARTICLES', 'PHYSICS', 'CONSTRAINT', 'DATA', 'MATERIAL', 'TEXTURE')

You can add as many hotkeys for different tabs as you want.