Each editor window has a header that contains menus and buttons. When the window is narrow any content that cannot fit is hidden and unavailable.
I think it would be nice if we could choose to drag the header so that it is twice as high. Once you do so then any hidden content could then wrap to the next line…
This means that we could make some windows much smaller, but still have access to everything on the header. The timeline is a good example because we don’t really need to make it as wide as is required for the header.
Another obvious example is the Properties editor. That window is quite usable at a width that is too narrow to display all of the header icons.
With something like this available it might be nice to purposely add many more shortcut icons to the headers. The only users that would see them are those that choose to see them.
I Love this idea, it would certainly be easier than MMB + grabbing the Properties buttons and throwing them to the side to get to another button (minor irritation, but an irritation nonetheless). Thumbs up from me!
It think it would be important to NOT make the headers automatically wrap to extra lines. That would be a situation as you describe with IE and all those addon toolbars.
By default it should behave exactly as it does now, with extra items clipped and hidden. Extra rows should only be revealed if the user chooses to. That way we could put lots of extra stuff on there, like seldom used shortcuts, and they wouldn’t bother anyone that didn’t want them there taking up space.
It could also be nice if we get drag-and-drop for the headers as it means we could choose to have a row of shortcut icons below the current header contents.
And if a header could be arbitrary height, there is no reason why we couldn’t allow it to be zoomed independent of its contents. So with the Properties window we could choose to have icons with a much large hit area than we do now. Right now when the Properties window is at a nice and usable size I struggle to hit the icons in the header. Might just be my old eyes…
It looks interesting and I do support such an idea. I do like what it can do the context row, but the visual weighting with the properties window icon looks off (perhaps it should be lowered a little along with moving the context icons to be more centered).
Another way to improve the headers would be to make horizontal header panels would allow people to collapse various sets of menus and options that they wouldn’t be using at the moment.
For sure. I wasn’t really proposing a different size for those icons, more the idea that the user could choose to make them larger if they like without making everything else larger too.
+1 for all that can reduce scrolling.
Except for logic editor, problem exists in all editors.
After that guys will probably say that the default screen is unbalanced or simply ugly with all these headers of different size showing a lot of buttons.
But we don’t care : it is more functional.
I like it! Would be useful if optional. About bigger icons, i actually set them smaller (setting 68 dpi instead of 72 in preferences), because i find Blender UI eating up too space with text and icons, also look much cleaner and elegant to me, personally.
While speaking about headers and UI, I’m creating my own set of icons for Blender, early stage still, with tighter color palette, less gradients / shadows than current ones, cleaner/crisper, sort of mobile devices icon design. Because i find the current ones a bit “noisy” for my eyes, too much based on colors and less based on shape. But that would be in a personal build, if i can get it to work.
Yes, if you don’t specifically drag the size of the header (or make the contents of the header larger) you would see no change from the current behavior.
I think we are coming from the same place. I also like to keep the DPI setting lower than 72. But no matter how big or small I make everything the buttons on the Properties panel always seem too small in comparison. Again, might be just my old eyes. The solution proposed is to allow the header contents to be resized separately from the rest. Right now every header is exactly the same height so this isn’t possible.
I’m not sure how I could make it any clearer, except for mentioning it in every comment so far, that this is a completely optional behavior. How it works now would not change. You’d have to go out of your way to get the changes I’m proposing…
