Node Editor Pie

Contextual pie menu for the Geometry Nodes editor and the Shader editor when it is showing a material, keyed on the exact type of the active node: iops.call_pie_node opens it, iops.node_spawn_connected fires when a slot is picked, iops.node_pie_add_search backs the fallback pie's search slot. It does not appear for World or Line Style shading (the Shader editor's other two space.shader_type values), nor in the Compositor or texture-node editors.

Building a node graph is mostly repetition: add a node, find it in a menu, place it, drag a wire. The node that comes next is usually predictable from the node you're standing on — a Noise Texture is normally followed by a Color Ramp, a mesh primitive by Set Position or Transform. The pie collapses that sequence into one keypress plus one direction: pick a slot and the node spawns already wired in, spliced into anything already downstream of the active node, and handed straight to a grab.

Hotkey: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Q in the Node Editor. Rebindable in Preferences › iOps › Keymaps.

What decides the contents

The pie reads the current tree's type (GeometryNodeTree or ShaderNodeTree, the latter only for a material) and the active node's exact bl_idname, then looks up a rule for that node type:

• A matching rule with at least one filled slot draws its 8 entries as iops.node_spawn_connected buttons.
• No active node, or nothing selected (Blender leaves nodes.active pointing at the last active node even after Select All > None, so a deselect is treated the same as no active node), a node type with no rule, or a rule whose "slots" are all empty draws the fallback pie instead — a handful of generally-useful nodes plus an Add New Node… slot.
• Add New Node… opens a search over every node type Blender can actually create in the current tree. That catalog is built by attempting creation in a scratch node group and catching the failure, not by trusting Node.poll(), which misreports several node types (ShaderNodeMath, ShaderNodeMix, ShaderNodeValToRGB, NodeReroute and others) in Blender 5.2.2. The ~600-class probe only runs the first time a search is opened for a given tree type, per session.

What happens when you pick a slot

• The node is created. If there is an active node, it is wired from the first enabled, non-hidden output of the active node (or the slot's from_socket override, if it resolves) into the first compatible input on the new node.
• No active node, or nothing selected: the new node is simply placed at the 2D cursor — nothing is linked or spliced.
• Splice: if that output already fed other nodes downstream, each of those existing links is rerouted through a compatible output of the new node instead of the active node's — so dropping a node into the middle of a chain doesn't break what was downstream of it. All downstream consumers move, not just the first. If the new node has no output compatible with a given downstream link, that one link is left exactly as it was — it is not spliced or removed — and iOps reports it rather than creating a type-mismatched link.
• If the new node has no compatible input at all, it still spawns and is placed — just unlinked, with an info report. A pie press never comes back with nothing.
• If the active node has no usable output at all, the same applies in reverse: the new node still spawns and is placed, unlinked, with an INFO report.
• The node is placed next to the active node (or, when spliced, roughly midway along the wire if there's room) and handed to a grab (transform.translate, invoked modally). Cancelling the grab (Esc / RMB) only cancels the move — the node stays at its placed position with its links intact.
• The new node becomes the sole selection and the active node, so the next pie press continues the chain from it.

User presets

Shipped defaults live in the addon. A per-user override file, one per tree type, lives at:

scripts/presets/IOPS/node_pies/<tree_type>.json

i.e. GeometryNodeTree.json and ShaderNodeTree.json. A rule you add there for a node type replaces the shipped rule for that type wholesale — there is no per-slot merging, so an addon update can never half-overwrite an edit you made. Setting "slots": [] for a type forces the fallback pie for it. A slot naming an unknown bl_idname (version mismatch, missing addon) is dropped at draw time with a one-time console warning rather than breaking the pie; malformed JSON degrades to the shipped defaults with a one-time warning. An empty or whitespace-only file is treated as "no overrides yet" and quietly uses the shipped defaults — no warning, by design.

Slot order

slots is an 8-entry list, indexed in Blender's own pie draw order:

Index	Direction
0	W
1	E
2	S
3	N
4	NW
5	NE
6	SW
7	SE

null leaves a slot empty (drawn as a separator in the pie). Lists shorter than 8 are padded with null.

Entry fields

Field	Type	Meaning
node	string, required	bl_idname of the node to spawn
text	string, optional	Pie button label; defaults to the node's Blender UI name
icon	string, optional	Blender icon identifier for the button
props	object, optional	Attributes set on the new node (e.g. operation, data_type, domain)
inputs	object, optional	Input socket default values, keyed by socket name or by index given as a string (e.g. "1")
from_socket	string or int, optional	Which output of the active node to link from, overriding the default first-enabled-output pick; a name or index that doesn't resolve on the active node falls back to the default instead of failing

Preferences — Node Editor Pie section

Preferences › iOps › Preferences, in the Node Editor Pie rollout, edits the rule store directly; edits apply the next time the pie opens, whether or not they've been saved to disk.

• Geometry Nodes / Shader toggle — which tree type's rules are being edited.
• Rule list — __fallback__ pinned first, then every node type with a rule. + starts a rule for another node type via the same catalog search as Add New Node; − makes the selected node type fall back to the generic pie (writes "slots": [] for it) — it does not restore the shipped default; use Reset Rule for that.
• Eight slot rows, labelled W E S N NW NE SW SE — each has a node-type search field and an X to clear it. A slot carrying props or inputs shows them as a dimmed, read-only summary next to it; those two fields are edited only by hand in the JSON, not here.
• Save writes only the rules that differ from the shipped defaults for the current tree type to its preset file — a node type you never touched is never frozen into your file, so a future addon update can still reach it. A rule you emptied with − ("slots": []) counts as different and is written. Reload re-reads that file from disk, discarding unsaved in-memory edits. Reset Rule drops the selected rule back to its shipped default. Reset All drops every rule for the current tree type back to the shipped defaults.

v1 limits

• Geometry Nodes editors, and Shader editors showing a material, only — the Compositor, World/Line Style shading and texture-node editors are not covered.
• Multi-selection is ignored; the pie always acts on the active node alone.
• props and inputs can only be set by hand-editing the preset JSON. There is no UI for them yet.

Tips

• A node type absent from both the shipped tables and your preset file always gets the fallback pie — that's expected, not a bug; add a rule for it if you want something more specific.
• Because a user rule replaces a shipped one wholesale, copying just the slots you want to change is not enough — write out all 8 slots for that node type in your JSON, or use the prefs UI, which always writes the full 8.