User Action List for Quick Access
The "History" category under the "Tools" tab allows the user to repeat the most recent action or view/select past actions from a list of recently used commands.
A good feature to round out the whole history panel would be a simple list box where the user may pin recent actions for quick and easy access at any time.
Here's a quick mockup of what that might look like. For the sake of demonstration, I've stolen the material menu style; the final design doesn't need to (and probably won't) be identical.
This would be useful not just to improve access to obscure functions that are buried deep in the interface (which have to be searched with the spacebar menu), but also commands that don't have a default keybinding and even just to have all your commonly used commands for a particular project together in one place.
One way to accomplish this would be to press a "pin last" button that would add the most recently performed command to the list. Another possibility would be to right-click an action from a menu and choose "pin" from the context menu.
The existing "History..." tool does satisfy this need to some degree, but it isn't optimal. Every time a new action is performed, the list increases in length and all the items shift farther back. Having to hunt down a recently used command from this list is obviously not practical in many cases. It might even be prudent to merge the existing history dropdown with this new list, such that new actions are always being added to the list automatically, and pinning an action simply forces it to remain at the top of the list at all times.
5 Comments
Would be nice if it where not on the side but just projected over 3D view, And have a few algorythms for caching, ea most frequent used width caching memory of x commands. Or simple last one used, or most used ever
@peter.boos: I can't speak for most users, but I would definitely prefer control and consistency over a "smart" solution.
Having a list that ranks actions by usage frequency would be helpful, but only as a supplement to the explicitly user-defined list. It would be irritating if the commands in the list constantly kept shuffling around and reordering every time you do something, which poses one of the same problems the existing "History..." feature has.
@quargzon: thats why i said a "few" algorithms
@peter.boos: Having a few sorting algorithms is perfectly fine. I just want to make it clear that whether there are two algorithms or twenty, there needs to be a concrete list the user can control.
I don't want the efficiency of my workflow to be at the mercy of an "algorithm". I want to stress the importance of having a manual option for when an algorithm is insufficient.
I 100% agree. It is so annoying that you have to buy an addon for something like that. We need this feature by default in blender for users that have no knowledge of python and don't want to go in that part of Blender yet.