Eight years later and still no arrows. I always used to use the hypershade but I recently encountered a problem where my scene was randomly hanging when trying to work in the hypershade to assign shaders to my scene which has 160+ shaders. I'm not sure what was causing it, might have been converting instances to objects, but anyway when I switched to working with the same shaders in the node editor everything was fine. However, this is obviously not satisfactory because you can't browse your shaders in the node editor, and 160 shaders is too many for the right-click pop-up menu which doesn't scroll or have arrows! BUT... I just realised you can browse and assign your shaders from the outliner. Just turn off Display>DAG Objects Only and then in the search field you can filter the results, or scroll until your heart's content. I'm in the habit of naming all my shaders with the suffix "_Shader" or "_ShaderSG" so I can just type this in the Outliner's search field. However, if you don't have a common text string, you can just select any object in your scene that has a shader, then in the attribute editor go to the shader tab and then click the 'Select' button. Then in the Outliner go to Show>Show Selected Type(s) and just find the shader you want. You can right click it and select 'Assign Material To Selection' in the usual way.
(Having said that, Autodesk please could you just add the arrows to the right-click menu and/or make the hypershade more stable, not to mention fix the annoying thing where everytime I open the hypershade, which I like to use with just the Browser and Node/Graph, it opens with the material viewer, create window and property editor before then closing those three windows again... oh and also the annoying thing where sometimes the nodes are all stacked up against the very left hand edge of the graph area, which still happens in Maya2024 from time to time 🙂 )
