Simplifying the Outliner: Only Show the Active Icon
This proposal aims to improve the usability of the outliner by only displaying the icon of the currently selected item. This will lead to a cleaner interface, faster identification of elements, and a more efficient workflow.
Benefits:
- Cleaner Interface:
Reduces visual clutter by hiding redundant icons. Emphasizes the selected item, making it easier to identify. Creates a more organized and minimalist space.
- Visual Efficiency:
Allows for quick scanning of the list and finding the desired element. Reduces eye strain by eliminating the distraction of unnecessary icons. Optimizes workflow by facilitating navigation through the outliner.
- Rapid Identification:
Associates each item with its unique icon, creating a memorable visual reference. Facilitates the distinction between similar elements, especially those with long names. Accelerates the selection of the desired item, improving productivity.
- Versatile Implementation:
Can be applied to any type of list of elements, not just outliners but also, for example, bone lists. Improves usability in space-constrained interfaces. Offers a consistent user experience across different applications.
Examples:
7 Comments
Actually this could help the "I can see it in the viewport but it does not render" problem, if all the icons are shown if any are in the non-default position. Something with viewport turned on and render turned off would show both the viewport-on icon and render-off icon (and other icons too).
Lol, I thought about it a few days ago also, why are there like 50 icons of eyes 50 icons of viewport 50 icons of render 50 icons selection, and a crazy number of icons of checkboxes if you use those?
Your proposal makes absolute sense, but I bet any longtime user of Blender feels uncomfortable with this idea (at least I do), I think implementing it as optional would be a nice experiment but there's a real benefit for ease of use when you see the button of the hide, and press it. Some workflows require constant hiding and unhiding of objects.
I really feel unsure about this. I usually like ideas for reducing clutter for clarity, but this one just makes me dread the potential confusion it might cause.
Blender already hides some restriction toggles by default for the sake of reducing visual clutter.
And right now it is quite frequent to find people wondering why objects are visible in viewport but not in render, and vice versa, or why some objects are visible only when linked, ... Or non-selectable, ...
Hence I'm not sure this is the right direction to go.
That is precisely the motivation to make the proposal, with many elements it is visually difficult to find which objects are hidden or for rendering, due to the amount of active icons, on the contrary by showing only the active icons in a clean interface you can identify them better. I already argued the benefits, remember in UI design less is more. I think it goes along with Blender's philosophy of a light, clean interface.
I also think there is a problem that causes confusion and visual noise now that I see it, the orange icon of the object, as you can appreciate, does not change its color when you activate the hide icon or any other icon that is activated. The logical thing to do would be to turn it's color off or opaque when hiding the object, unless there is a reasonable explanation that the orange object icon should remain unchanged. Something like this:
Huh... Now that you show it mocked up in Blender, it looks more appealing :o
Also good catch on the object icon opacity.
That looks like a bug and should be reported as such. I just did: projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/120393