Blender 2.8: menu > submenu redesign, less hotkeys, better ergonomics

hi,
I have been thinking of my short menu patches recently.

The first concept is:
1/ To reduce vertical scrolling in menus
Issue: 1.1/
sitting in an ergonomic computer user position, scrolling up and down means more work, especially if it’s to excess. Long menus mean more movement to get to the tools you need and more memory as you need to remember the position of several elements with no correlation to sub relationships.

To address this issue, sub menus are of great importance.

Solve: Issue 1/
Solve Issue 1.1/: Group menu items into correlating sub menus.

Current 3d view header View menu:


Working example:

Example here shows 26 menu items carefully grouped into 12 menu items.
The hotkeys listed in either menu are 46. maybe it would be sensible to reduce these too, making them match the menus?

A note on menu hotkey: if you press a hotkey then press a number, the menu item in the number pressed will correlate to the menu item in the original hotkey menu. this has potential too.

what do you think?

Less hotkeys / more keystrokes will just hurt the high skilled blender artists. Sure have that as an option aswell, but keep the hotkeys how they are so that those who are after increasing their efficiency still can.

Agreed. The menu condensation looks nice and makes sense. The hotkey and menu number sound good too but we should still be able to access anything with just a simple hotkey, and also to customize the shortcut for any menu entry.

The hotkeys are one of more important. And the mayor part are in the number panel, that nobody care.

ABout reduce the list, for my is not a problem. Actually is so big that I need more time to go up that enter in a menu

Long menus mean … more memory as you need to remember the position of several elements with no correlation to sub relationships.

It is true.
It is another problem but when you don’t remember in what menu an operator is, you are using search.
Search currently indicates Area and Shortcut when there is one. But no menu is mentioned.
So, it would be good to also find a way to expose menus and sub-menus in search floating panel.

It is probably not necessary to change width of panel if for example, path of highlighted item is displayed above search field.

I don’t know how related this is to the subject but it would be great to be able to assign shortcuts from the search menu as well.

Less hotkeys / more keystrokes will just hurt the high skilled blender artists. +1

What about Blender Tabs in Master ?
Blender tabs Interface - Clean and fast blender UI

The concern I have is…That new users do not know what is in what menu…this can cause a lot of frustration and searching…it is messy the way it is, but the new user sees more ‘at a glance’…I’m not saying the way it is done is perfect, but new users are more likely to leave blender if they cannot find the simplest things…only because they were hidden behind a sub menu…OTOH veterans to blender do not really care how the menus are…most of us rarely access them…I think the only menu I use is ‘file’…

So my end point is it is ‘probably’ a bad thing to hide a lot of things in sub menus…but! getting a good standard setup for 2.8x and a bit of reorganizing is probably in order at this point…TBH it should not affect my workflow…I, however, can not speak for everyone.

one thing for certain…this is non debatable…I am putting my foot down!
less hotkeys = bad
more hotkeys = good

another thing mentioned was using the search…zeauro, I think(sorry if I butchered your name)…I think it would be a good option(toggle) to have if you do a search for a command or operation the the menu is rolled out and the item is highlighted in the interface…to give new users visual representation of where to find it in the future.,just a thought.

just an idea

would there be a way to use pop up menus instead ?

I mean put together things correlated and with a pop up menu show the different options
then just select one
instead of reading 10 lines scrolling and trying to find which one to select !

should be faster and easier I think
but need new way to make pop up window

happy bl

+1 for pop up menus that appear under cursor when hotkey combination is pressed, ideally this can lead to a “clean table” look with only 3d viewport open like in modo zen addon.

Look at that beautiful clean interface with super user hotkey popups drools