Currently I used the < and > keys to scrub through my keyframes when animating. However maya seems to count this as an action, so when I hit undo, maya also goes through all the times I pressed the < and > keys too. Is there a way I can use the shortcut keys < and > to scrub through my timeline keyframes without maya taking this into account whenever I do an undo.

Any idea anyone?

It’s not the keyboard shortcut that you’re using that is being undone, but it’s the time-change itself that is being undone.  (For example, mouse-click on several times, then see that you can undo those time changes).  That makes it a bit harder, but it we can combine them into one action, then we can undo them in one action.

Take a look at the -ock and -cck flags on undoInfo.  I think they should let you do what you’re looking for here.  For instance, you can open a chunk (possibly through a hotkey) do your scrubbing, then close the chunk and undo:

Sorry for the confusing terms.  The -ock and -cck flags are the abbreviations for “open chunk” and “close chunk”.  The idea is that you are creating a ‘chunk’ of commands that the undo queue should treat like a single command.  Any commands run between when you ‘open’ and when you ‘close’ a chunk should be treated as a single command.  That will mean that if you hit ‘undo’ they will all be undone in a single step. 

You should take care to always close the chunk afterward, though, or else Maya’s undo function might not work correctly.

You were asking to have the time changes ignored entirely, but Maya doesn’t work that way.  This might be the best compromise. 

So a good workflow might be:
1) Open a chunk with the ‘undoInfo -ock’ command.  You can assign this to a hotkey, or to a shelf button.

2) Scrub the timeline to your heart’s content.

3) Close the chunk with the ‘undoInfo -cck’ command.  This can also be assigned a hotkey or shelf button.  If you’re feeling really fancy you can assign them both to the same hotkey and make it a toggle.

4) If you want to undo the scrubbing (and go back to the time that you were at before you started scrubbing), call ‘undo’.  My little close() function calls does both steps 3) and 4) at the same time.

This is just a way to encapsulate the timeline changes.  The bottom part of my example code is just an example of how you might use it—it opens, scrubs the time, then closes and calls undo.

Is that clearer now?

-T

I think probably the best you can get is:

1) < or > set to a function that will open the chunk (if necessary) and do the scrub action
2) scrub with < and/or >
3) Call some other function to close the chunk and undo.  Just calling ‘undo’ won’t quite work.  I suppose you -could- override the undo hotkey temporarily to call this close-and-undo proc, but that would be risky since if something goes wrong it might break the undo mechanism.

Would that be a workflow that could work for you?

-T