Why have there been no new types of windows since the 2.5 refactor?

I keep wishing for ANY WAY to customize a palette of favorite buttons (hotkeys are not for everybody and sometimes very awkward). A new window type would be perfect place for that, as well as a place for Addon interfaces since the 3D view panels are easily way too overloaded plus they have little flexibility. The vertical tab idea has already been overwhelmed if you have many addons enabled.

As far as I can tell, you can’t make a new window with python either has to be hard-coded.
Am I just squeaking into the wind? Doesn’t seem like discussions of ideas for Blender have much weight here.
thanks

Yes there has… Movie Clip Editor. Was introduced in 2.61

How did I miss that going all the way back to 2.6? Guess I don’t do serious animation that much, and upon inspection at least half of the window types are associated with animation.

Seems like a wasted opportunity though. I window type devoted to addons would be a good start: better workspace for the developer to work with, more flexible integration with the window layouts by the user, and off-load all those frickin tabs!
I could open as many ‘addon’ windows as I need with a different addon in each one, perhaps display different addons for different screen setups.

Campbell once had plans to extend the Python API so it can create custom spaces, but that was many years back (during the 2.5 project) and the idea was never mentioned again.

It might be worth looking at for one of the 2.8 releases.

+1
should go hand in hand with UI plans proposed :yes:

It kinda grinds my gears when people start like “why X feature is not yet in”

Is this retorical question? Maybe because blender recently hit record 10 devs, that is still less than 1 per feature.

Custom toolshelfs per workspace is the works.

Lucky you, this is exactly what we are planning to do :wink:
The idea is to be able to customize the toolshelf and the properties sidebar of every editor per workspace, either in a new area within the toolshelf or within the panels itself. It’s not exactly clear how this will work yet. But the goal is to be able to customize every workspace (which will be an evolution of the current screen layouts, but more powerful) so it perfectly fits your needs. You can even assign custom keymaps per workspace if you want to.
We are still working on the docs to describe what we discussed and agreed on during the workflow workshop 2 weeks ago. Here’s a summary: https://code.blender.org/2016/12/highlights-of-workflow-workshop/

Sebastian,
will this also include creating custom Editor Types via python? This would really ba a huge gain. That way scripters may have full control of how a screen can look like. This will craeate complete new possibilities for addons.

I don’t know. At least this topic wasn’t mentioned during the workshop. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but so far there are no plans for it.
What I forgot to mention though: You will be able to enable addons per workspace as well, so that for example a sculpting addon will not clutter your toolshelf in the default workspace.

Sebastian,
sounds like some great changes are ahead.

But this probably means also breaking all current addons, right?

As Ton said, this change must be part of a bigger patch for the UI. I full disscusion is on progress in UI mailing list

No idea, this is beyond my knowledge :wink:
But 2.8 will be quite the change anyway, some breakage can’t be avoided.

I’m waiting for this patch !!!

I so much disagree with this. Being able to create custom editors is one thing (and a very cool one at that, but the problem we have now isn’t the lack of a dedicated space for add-ons, it’s add-on developers not taking the time to properly integrate their add-ons into Blender’s UI. Better integration is needed (e.g. the ability to insert a menu item anywhere in a menu, the ability to add options anywhere in a panel, the ability to more easily re-arrange panels), not a whole new space to offload the same problem to.

Fweeb, how many add-ons have you by default on ?.

Although i like the idea of customization, enforcing some standard might be good too. Just imagine how hard blender will becomme to learn if suddenly we get lots of mixed GUI’s, it would becomme problematic to teach someone something on youtube, or to explain something on skype cause the user isnt aware where the button was taken from…

Personally said it before i just hope that the vertical addon bar stays but gets layered maybe even with a filter as per active node where blender is in. think of it as if the properties windows had another such button bar below it (and for example first button opens 10 related buttons)… it could easily navigate 100rth property pannels then. and yet be also compact. while everything gets a fixed place.
ofcourse each item would have custom buttons on a lower level buttons.

well just my 5 sec.

Also as temporary workaround, remember that we can pin items. And pins are separate per workspace iirc.

Sounds great.
Just wanted to throw a reference in here. Have you ever looked at how rhino defines it’s toolbars? When ctrl or shift dragging / clicking buttons you can move / copy them and open an editor where you can edit or create a new script which is the buttons functionality. Every button in rhino is essentially a macro calling an API hook.
Ask Nathan letwory. He’s working there.