Make keys bold or as icons in Status Bar tips and color them for toggled keys
When using, for example, the knife tool, a text appears in the status bar that should help understand how to use the tool.
Since all the text appears in the same size and weight, it is difficult to understand which key combinations can be used.
I suggest that the text itself will remain as it is but the key combinations will be more prominent, maybe even with icons of the key itself, so you can quickly see which key combinations the tool accepts and then read what each combination does.
In the picture you can see, for example, how the keys look when you use the duplicate with Shift+D, it is much more readable than the line that is displayed when you use the knife tool for example.
Shift+D Status Bar:
Knife Tool Status Bar:
In tools where a certain key changes working mode, it would be nice if the icon of the key would change its color depending on the key's state.
4 Comments
Agree Blender's UX is very busy. Hard to find things. Also agree the line-of-text is easy to miss and even once you learn to look for it, clunky. For example when I use knife's 'c' key it's hard work for my eyes to find that setting and when I press it to find it again to ensure it's on on.
But not sure making that line of text bold really improves things. Certainly won't make it any easier for your eyes to pick out settings in that line (like whether 'c' is on or off). Perhaps a better way would be to turn the settings from a line of plain text into a line of controls (checkboxes and input fields) as required.
There's a bigger problem with curve strokes and that line of text they haven't fixed: It tells you to use the wrong keys. Was reported in the bug tracker.
I agree with you, I meant that there is no need to make major changes to this line in the current state of the interface, but only to emphasize the key combinations and maybe even color them according to the state of the key. for example, if the C key is ON then color the key green, when it is off then red, etc.
I'll upvote because yes it's very hard to pick out the current settings from that line and it really slows you down. While proper controls would be better, highlighting the current settings (e.g. 'cut through' is on or off) in color instead of bold (at the moment its plain text like everything else which makes it so hard to read), and yeah, I'm on board.
Few notes: Might be a difficult change to make since AFAIK you can't even make a label bold in the Blender panel let alone color. Doing proper controls would probably be an easier change.
I updated the post according to the comments and added pictures for demonstration.