There are tons of features and hotkeys and hidden marking menus in Maya that are extremely useful but surprisingly seldom known. While everyone is talking about big new features, these underdogs can easily be forgotten.
I just started a “tip of the day” with my animators at work because I realized that there are lot of these things that they aren’t aware of, but being a major geek, I’ve read through the help docs like a crime-thriller novel. (It turns out the Zoom Tool did it.) Today’s was such a hit that I thought I’d start posting some of the best ones here.
Tip of the day
Hold down ‘K’ and drag in the viewport. Your timeline will scrub as if you were dragging down on the time slider. Middle-mouse drag and your characters will stay in place for copying keyframes. (Again, same as the time slider.) This also works in the graph editor and the dope sheet.
Customize the Hotkey
In the hotkey editor this feature can be found under Tools > TimeDraggerToolActivate. This means that you can map it to another key if you wish. You could also invoke the context in your own custom UI tools.