Blender is a "keyboard" program — the fast way is keys, not menus. You only need to memorize maybe 12 of these. The rest you'll pick up. Hover your mouse over the viewport (the 3D area) before pressing a key, or it won't work.
Flying Around (the view)
| Middle Mouse drag | Orbit / spin the view around your stuff |
| Shift+MMB | Pan — slide the view sideways |
| Scroll wheel | Zoom in and out |
| 1 3 7 (numpad) | Front / side / top straight-on views |
| 0 (numpad) | Look through the camera (what the movie sees) |
Moving Things (= Scratch motion)
| G | Grab / movelike "go to x: y:" / "glide to" |
| R | Rotatelike "turn 15 degrees" |
| S | Scale / resizelike "set size to 100%" |
| then X / Y / Z | Lock the move to one direction only |
| Click / Esc | Click to confirm, Esc to cancel a move |
Building & Editing
| Shift+A | Add anything (mesh, light, camera...) |
| X | Delete the selected thing |
| Tab | Switch Object Mode ⇄ Edit Mode (reshape) |
| Shift+D | Duplicate (copy) the selected thing |
| N | Open the side panel (exact positions, camera lock) |
Animating (= Scratch over time)
| I | Insert a keyframe (pin "here, at this frame")the core of all animation |
| Spacebar | Play / pause the animation |
| Drag the blue line | Scrub through time in the Timeline |
| F12 | Render the current frame as a picture |
| Ctrl+F12 | Render the whole animation into a movie |
Lifesavers
| Ctrl+Z | Undo — fixes basically any mistake |
| Ctrl+S | Save your .blend file (do it often!) |
| Shift+C | Lost? Recenter the view and find everything |
| Z | Switch shading (wireframe / solid / material / render) |
| A | Select all · Alt+A deselect all |