Hi Elaine and Tom,
Thanks for the explanations, that was very helpful. The build-in shift functionality indeed explains the translate/rotate behaviour!
For me the shift button + "reversed" translate/rotate functions work perfectly, so I guess I will keep it that way. Is there anything else that speaks against it?
For fitting, I am dealing with ribosomes and I have come to align the map I am fitting into in a way that makes the features clearly distinguishable (i. e. the straight solvent side of the large subunit viewed from the side), then I just move in my new map rotate to align the features and dump it using the z translate until it is in the other map, followed by fit in map.
I was contemplating on how much I should stick to my old habits vs. trying new behaviours that might be more effcient in the long run. It is clear that ChimeraX offers many new opportunities for improving the workflow, but for now I like to keep my old logic (which cleary comes from using Chimera for a long time). I like to have three separate keys for rotating - xy translating - z translate that can be modified for the selected model (or dragged, will look into that). Therefore, I came up with the following setup:
mousemode shift leftMode 'translate selected models' mousemode shift middleMode 'rotate selected models' mousemode shift wheel contour mousemode setting contour speed 0.1 mousemode control wheel 'translate selected models' mousemode setting zoom speed -1
fun F1 cofr sel
camera ortho set bgColor grey lighting soft
This actually leaves the right mouse button completely free and I was already wondering what could be a good function to map here!
An unrelated observation that I had was that with grey background the selection rectangle while holding control is not visible on the background anymore (It works with white and black).
Helge