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  • Published 29 Oct 2017

Custom editors for user created toolbars

I had an idea that I believe could solve many UI/workflow related problems. Remember how the 'T' toolbar in the 3d Viewport looks? It has tabs and foldable categories. Now imagine if the same kind of toolbar could contain anything you wanted and you could also place it anywhere you wanted.

How to place it wherever you want? Make it into an editor, so that you can duplicate it, make it as small or as large as you want etc. Even better, if you could add as many of these editors as you want, and name them as you want, you could have an almost completely customizable user interface.

So how would it work?

In the button where you select the editor type (3d viewport, graph editor, uv/image editor etc), there could be an "add toolbar" button.

This would create an empty space in which you can add buttons, sliders, drop-down menus, basically anything, from everywhere in the program. It should be as simple as Right clicking on the desired button, copying its path and adding it into the newly created editor/toolbar. You should be able to choose the orientation of the toolbar (horizontal or vertical) just like you can in some headers if I remember correctly. You should be able to have tabs if desired, and be able to choose if they appear on the left, right, top, or bottom. Either named, as in the 'T' toolbar, or with icons as in the properties editor. You should also have the possibility to add categories, just like in the 'T' toolbar, as explained previously.

This is pretty much it. If you scale this idea, you could imagine that every editor already existing in blender is a preset. Of course I understand that this could be a massive undertaking, and I'm nowhere near a level at programming where I could understand if this could be possible given the current design. I just tried to limit my ideas to already existing functionality, that maybe (in my little mind) would only need organization, and not complete redesign of things.

If something is not clear about this proposal, please ask. Have a good day!

80%

Development Status: Open

Upvote 4 Downvote 1
cloudsquall88
29 Oct 2017

4 Comments

johnroper100

This is one of the goals for Blender 2.8 and the Blender 101 project.

1
cloudsquall88 Author

I'd really like to know the reason for the downvote.

ChameleonScales

You can't make a single UI design that fits every use case. Customizable panels are very useful to speed up your workflow and clear up your view and some programs make use of it. For example Paintstorm studio (see the overview at this timecode ).

1
ChameleonScales

in any case you might want to see this very similar proposal rightclickselect.com/p/scripting/Lrbbbc/create-editable-custom-area-type