elovikov
You probably can intercept M (btw for production it's probably safer to use hou.hotkeys.assignments("h.pane.gview.handle.xform.cycle_alignment")) in onKeyEvent and manually set the alignment via hou.Handle.applySettings but I'm not sure if you can do that for builtin handles.

    def onKeyEvent(self, kwargs):
        event = kwargs["ui_event"]
        node = kwargs["node"]
        key = event.device().keyString()
        if key.upper() in [f.upper() for f in hou.hotkeys.assignments("h.pane.gview.handle.xform.cycle_alignment")]:
            # switch between local and world space.
            node.parm("local").set(not node.evalParm("local"))
            return True

mabelzile
As for the python handle calling python states command, it technically works but from a design standpoint it's best to avoid any explicit coupling between a python handle and the active python state.

elovikov
Oh, interesting. I was actually suggesting key intercepting for builtin handle. I thought for your custom one you have cycling implemented in the handle itself (like in move_tool_handle in demo handles) and you just want to notify the state.

btw have you tried custom handles on macs? In my experience I just can't make them work because the whole gadgets system seems broken on osx (at least on my end in 18.5 on Big Sur)

elovikov

mabelzile
As for the python handle calling python states command, it technically works but from a design standpoint it's best to avoid any explicit coupling between a python handle and the active python state.

I agree but still, notifying the state about settings changed seems natural. We're even receiving onHandleToState when settings changed but we just have it with the empty mod_parms. So we know that handle state was changed, we just don't know which one.

I'm currently writing handles for my sdf editor and I ended up using parameters for behavior control instead of settings as it seems more flexible (though I don't need an ui and don't actually care about saving handles state to scene)