Better UI Feedback for Undo
Undo (Ctrl+Z) is one of those keyboard shortcuts which is frequently used by everyone in Blender and makes our life easier. In its simplest form, using Undo gives you the possibility to roll your project back in time step by step. However, I recognize a few pain points with the current Undo support:
- If there are "no more steps to undo", Blender gives you no visual feedback.
- If the action you are undoing is not very "visual" (fx undoing a property being set, changing between two blue materials, scaling by 0.999999..), you don't know what you are undoing unless you remember it.
- It is not clear what actions you took "can be undone" and which actions cannot be undone.
- It is not clear how far back in history I can expect to go with Undo, or what possibility I might have to Redo (Ctrl+Y / Ctrl+Shift+Z)
- Undoing some actions can be CPU intensive and give the impression that Blender has frozen.
My suggestion is that Undo should have a more visual presence in the interface:
- There should always be visual feedback when undoing (fx a brief spinning cursor) and a possibility to know what you have undone (fx a tooltip).
- Give context of what is being undone and what would happen if "Undo" is pressed again.
- This is icing on the cake, but it could be useful to provide some meta-information (how many Undo steps are available) and a possibility to explore the history.
6 Comments
While making my baby steps into Blender add-on programming, I just discovered that Blender has a perfectly reasonable "busy" cursor icon (an old Windows style hourglass-like one).
Given that Blender doesn't behave like traditional Windows and macOS apps that flash the menu bar's relevant menu heading when executing an operation, I believe all menu/shortcut-only operations should show this cursor (or any more appropriate one), even if it's just a brief blink, to give us users feedback.
A more visual and precise undo can be accessed with CTRL-ALT-Z
@luisburdallo: Not a fan of that, I'd like to see blender copy Photoshops actions
@othoap: The thing is that you already have a list of undo you just have to access it with that shortcut. They might need to improve the action names or something. I struggle sometimes to read it but at least is there.
Yes, agreed. The undo in blender is not one I like to rely on. It always gets messy when your undoing goes from Edit to object mode. I always wonder how hard it is to track that jump.
@othoap: 2.8 undo works differently. Have you tried it? It does work as expected now. It should just undo whatever action you did. So if you subdivide the object, moved from edit mode to object and move an object it should move backward, entering in edit mode and un-subdividing the mesh. The old undo was really problematic undoing all your edit steps.