Can a circle be filled with a triangle fan?

Question

When a cylinder is added to a scene Triangle Fan fill type for the cap is provided in the last operator panel.

Is there any tool to use with a circle to fill it like triangle fan would do?

The alternatives Grid Fill and F (n-gon) can't be used when the vertex in the center of the circle is required.

Answer 1

Create and poke face

You can do this with 2 operations.

F, ⎇ AltP

• F (creates a face)
• ⎇ AltP (poke face, creating a triangle fan)

See: Mesh -> Face menu for both.

Note for Blender 2.80 users: Shortcut for Poke Faces was removed and the menu entry relocated to Face -> Poke Faces.

Extrude and merge edges

E, Escape, ⎇ AltM, A

• E (Extrude)
• ⎇ AltM (Merge)
  • A (Menu accelerator for the A̲t Center option)

Note:

• Create face & Poke will assign UV's & vertex colors from surrounding faces (the extrude method will simply extend UV's/colors, which may not be what you want).
• Poke uses a more advanced method to calculate the face center point
  (noticeable when edges aren't evenly spaced).