Hahaha, NEVER.
The tool settings stays in the properties editor. Moving it would be a childish and stupid idea. 
As Pablo said in the live stream, they are still flirting with the idea of whether to move them or not.
And I am fully convinced that they can’t stay in the properties editor, because of reasons I’ve explained multiple times in this thread:
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Tool settings in 3D view properties editor = Unintuitive design. These settings are too far away and too visually detached from the tool:
At first, following a “Photoshop” kind of an aproach, they’ve introduced the “Top bar”, which definitely works for user intuition. It’s easy to read.
However, they couldn’t fit all the settings there without making a mess, so they placed more expansive tool settings in the properties editor, to patch up this issue. But now they can’t take out the top bar, because they would lose the intuitive design… So the design looks “patched up” to fix the issues, instead of fixing the issues from the root. -
Space wars. There can be multiple instances of editors, that have their own tool active. They are all equal. If active tool settings are in the properties editor, it can only display the settings of one active tool at a time, and each editor is fighting for that space. Make peace, not war.
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Inconsistency with the properties editor. The properties editor is to edit properties of objects within the 3D view, and render settings. Theorically, this whole editor should be within the 3D view, but it isn’t just to make the GUI more flexible.
Tool settings, especially considering that various editors have active tools, are a black sheep within the properties editor. -
A whole tab to display nothing. Most active tools, unless they are drawing active tools, don’t have any settings. So, for most of the time - that tab displays a whole lot of nothing. This may not be a big deal, but it’s a deal nontherless.
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Full screen editor problem. If you go and stay in full screen on the editor, you can’t see the full settings of a tool as the properties editor gets hidden. This is especially relevant when drawing. You still get the top bar (Which, i remind you, is a mess when there’s a lot of settings), but it would be far better to have the regular tool settings column when working this way.
Perfect is not possible, but there should be a whole lot better way to solve the GUI that would result in the least amount of issues.
For you perhaps. 
I’ve explained it.
Instead of just mocking it, actually adress the arguments.
2 Likes
No point arguing. This is all about personal experience. The more 3d software you use the more you know about those things.
When you see people shuffling settings like this in a software, it means lack of experience. This is not how you organize a software if you want it to be intuitive. But like I said, it takes time to understand. 
Oh, come on 
You can’t just throw blanket statements like that without providing a compelling set of actual arguments to back it up.
Well, you can, but there’s no point in doing that…
That was supposed to be settings of Active Tool of Workspace , not 3D View.
Your workspace may contain several editors but you are only working in one at a time.
So, you can only have only one active tool at a time.
Although there was not usability problem, this was not understood.
It would be logical now that Campbell allowed to display different active tool per editor to move properties of each tool to each editor.
But take a moment to think of Texture Paint workspace. Do you want brush settings in 2 tool settings bars or 2 open sidebars or in one independent Properties Editor ?
That is a valid point to have those settings into sidebar.
But I don’t see it as a reason to remove tab from properties editor.
It is the tab of workspace. It contains mode to switch when accessing the workspace and addons that should be enabled in that workspace.
And that space could be filled by addons properties, too.
IMO, they could coexist.
That’s very sensible. Pretty much what I’ve been proposing for some time, but better worded. However, like zeauro, I think we can keep them as a tab in properties, it’s always handy for some screen configurations, and why not keep a choice ?
Alright, More updates to the UI have been made.
I like where this is going.
However:
So… now there are three places to display the same tool properties??
This is getting a bit ridiculous imo. What is the purpose of the Top bar if we have the Tool properties in the N shelf? In the last “Blender today”, @sebastian_k said that Animators asked for a Toggle button. They got it. It’s “N”. Problem solved.
Still, I think the tool properties should move to the left of the editor, on the right of the tool palette. And you only need them in this ONE place. And the shortcut can be “T”. So it would cycle “Off; Tool palette; Tool palette with properties”. Makes sense?
I think they’re slowly realizing it’s become obsolete.
Your idea makes absolute sense.
It seems like the top row tool properties are gone now.
Oh… it’s back… wth…??
I really, really hate the N panel and this decision to just put everything there is not making me a happy camper. The Top panel has issues, it was just badly implemented but the N panel is 10x worse imo.
3 Likes
Yeah, the worst part is that this is not optional. They are forcing the people to use that damn cursed N-panel. I’m really really disappointed. 
I followed the evolution of blender 2.8
many inconsistencies have been resolved … and indeed now blender is usable.
now there is the pressure of wanting to come up with a stable release for June … there has been a sea of work, and there is still much more polishing work …
I believe that all these user annotations, when the storm of revolution and work has calmed down, after blender 2.80, after that the new pillars will be final, and there will be less work to do, you will see that all minority inconsistencies will be resolved with calm in blender 2.81. 2.82
said this…
the sorting between T sidebar and N sidebar
of tools and utilities and also addons, it must simply be reasoned to be well organized …
and I think some ideas are coming out slowly …
for the moment on dev-talk there are ideas to insert icons instead of veritical texts … columns of icons as for the property panels …
and at that point I don’t see why it could not return a new “T sidebar” by keeping the active tools, but using a new shortcut different for the disappearance and reappearance of the active tools
it is just some ideas that would come to my mind as evolution and optimization … just because I also consider the N sidebar too crowded with all the addons
The N panel has been treated as a dumping ground for miscellaneous Blender features since its debut in 2.5 alpha, it’s like the go to spot when the devs. are out of ideas on where to put things that won’t lead to too much pushback from users.
The top bar looked good on paper, though there’s no clean way to have something like a whole set of brush properties in that small space, and doing something like Microsoft Ribbon might induce hostility.
I don’t feel so bad about the N region, after all it’s supposed to host things that should be easily accessed from the viewport in full-screen-editor mode, so most of its content I feel is sensible. However, it’s true that it’s a ‘dumping ground’ like you say Ace. Whatever doesn’t fit elswhere will go in there… not saying it’s a cop-out, they have other more pressing concerns honestly… at some point we have to accept that interface stuff is very flexible and given some work we can fit it to our needs, whereas we can’t do that for, say, edit mode performance.
The N Panel is still a disaster i see.
1 Like