2023-09-13 User Interface Meeting

[pablovazquez]

User Interface Module Meeting

Regular User Interface module meeting for planning and coordination.
Next meeting on September 26th, 2023.

Attendees

• Julian Eisel
• Brecht Van Lommel
• Pablo Vazquez
• Thomas Dinges
• Hans Goudey
• Harley Acheson

Merged Since Last Meeting

• Fix: Enter on the filebrowser filename label skips operator #111693
• UI: Highlight Selected Enum #111074
  • Fix #109439: Use List Item widget colors for View Item widgets #111584
  • UI: Theme Versioning for Enum Highlighting #111819
  • UI: Fixes for the highlighting of Selected Enums #111938
  • UI: Show Selected Tool Item #111939
  • UI: Proper Selection Highlight for Confirms #111949
• UI: Header Status Text Changes #111676
• UI: Consistent Menu/Block/Popup Content Ordering #109798
  • UI: Improved Enum Title Determination #111818
  • UI: Reverse Order of Timeline Menu Items #111758
  • UI: Slight reduction and centering of UI_BTYPE_SEPR_LINE #111764
• Compositor: Re-organize Add menu #111481
• Shading Nodes: Refactor Add menu #111798
• Texture Nodes: Refactor Add menu #111838
• Small changes to Edit and File Menus
• Spreadsheet menu now themeable
• UI: Node Grid Adjustments for Line Width #111640
• UI: Add canvas picker to paint modes in 3D Viewport #111756
• UI: support searching in menus #110855
• UI: Hide widget emboss if inner color is fully transparent #111980
• UI: Allow “New Window” While in Maximized Area #111999
• Geometry Nodes: Extend add modifier menu with node group assets #111717
• Fix #111017: Improvements to the drawing of Color Ramps #111903
• Fix: Outliner missing update adding asset nodegroups #111924
• Fix #102687: Use Proper Style for Label Length Estimation #111908
• Fix #111821: Fix Stats While in Sculpt Mode #111945
• UI: Do not repeat icon for Shape Key operators in modifier options menu
• UI: Use asset icon for “Mark Asset” in menus #112111
• UI: Add “Open Recent” Menu entry to F4 context menu #111701
• UI: Fix inconsistent menu background padding #111826
• UI: Use asset icon for “Mark Asset” in menus #112111
• Fix #112028: Ctrl+Alt+Scroll not working on all selected objects #112095
• Fix #112087: Float curve flickers with aligned points at x axis #112205
• Fix #112129: Remove Blank Items from “Region Toggle” Pie Menu #112193
• Keymap: Add Numpad Return to create newline in Text object edit mode #112277

Go / No-Go

• UI: Change menu icons of single-choice enums to radio buttons #111796
  • Harley mentioned there might be an issue that he remembers from years ago, but that can just be fixed.
• UI: Window Title Changes #111998
  • Campbell & Harley okay with dropping the path, allows eventually using OS title bar area.
  • Pablo proposes *test.blend [path/to/file/] - Blender 4.0 Alpha
  • No agreement about the order here, but there is consensus about putting the version in here, without the subversion.
  • The PR has been updated to hide patch level if zero and to use Pablo’s format.
• UI: Change Order of Lists in File Browser Sidebar #112114
  • General agreement

Ongoing Projects

• UI: Display invalid cache as striped lines in the timeline #108481
  • Stalled because of color choices, which we agreed were quite distracting. Other than that the PR makes sense though.
  • Pablo will look at changing the theme colors, or the PR can dial back the opacity.
• UI: Unify Add menus #111746
  • Pablo and Hans will meet soon to make an initial plan for the modifier menu.
• UI: Import obj files by drag and drop #106871
  • Guillermo says it will be replaced by #111242
  • Other than that, the work is still in progress. It definitely makes more sense for this to be generalized not to just one format though.
• Remove ‘Edge Highlight’ overlay toggle #111431
  • There was a lot of back and forth, but there’s general movement towards consensus. We spent some time trying to clarify the history and different people’s opinions about the changes.
  • It’s not clear that we want to add more theme settings.
  • The description of the PR needs to be updated to describe the latest change. See Ingredients of a PR.
• UI: Possible Change of Interface Font #112209
  • The change proposes changing to a modern font that’s specifically designed for UIs. There was agreement about Inter, though the kerning would be worse until we support better complex shaping.
  • Doing the change in 4.1 might be better, but it’s nice to put a visible UI change in a large version bump. As the developer, Harley can make this work in 4.0.
  • BLF: Subpixel Positioning, Anti-aliasing, Hinting #105441
• UI: Theme: Allow transparency when editing text in widgets #112090
  • Straightfoward, change, Julian will review.
• Preview Sizes, decide between:
  • UI: Allow Integer Thumbnail Size Range #105815
    • This patch was preferred.
  • UI: Size Range of Preview Thumbnails #108557
    • Having a more flexible range was preferred.
• VFont: Use BLF for font & glyph loading #110187
  • This brings us closer to unifying the text features. The PR needs code review from Campbell.
  • It’s unclear how the change interacts with font and glyph caching. Julian mentioned that text object and UI caches shouldn’t interact.
• UI: Dynamic File Browser Tooltips #104547
  • There was agreement about the general idea.
  • The text is very dense. It might be helpful to remove some of the information so we don’t just include things in the tooltip because we can.
  • The file name should stand out from the other information. Would require something like #105905
• UI: Cleanup Dialog to Manage Orphaned Data #106653
  • Pablo will have another look at the design.
• UI: Improved Window Titles #111495
  • It’s an improvement over the current situation which is basically useless.
  • Shows the name of the editor for child windows instead of just “Blender <2>”
• Fix #72093: Collapse Wide Enum Lists to One Column #105386
  • Needs review from Campbell.
• Viewport: Split object/mode overlays into its own popover #112156
  • It makes mode-specific overlays signfiicantly more discoverable.
  • The change exposes weirdness with the existing polls for object-specific options. For example, grease pencil is a special case, since it shows overlay options only based on the active object. That feels weird, but maybe not bad.
• Viewport: Show Add menu if nothing is selected #112112
  • This is similar to recent changes in the node editor.
  • Some of the choices are arbitrary, but we agreed the choices were worth exploring.
• Outliner: Double-click on item icon to select contents/hierarchy #110151
  • Julian will have a look at the PR.
• Menu search
  • The feature could still use a bit of polishing
  • Put the top left of the search menu at the same location as the top corner of the initial menu
  • Add the “Search” icon in the header with the tooltip text of “Type to Search”
  • There are some issues with IME entry
    • The first character could be added to the initial IME text search, though it may be trickier than this
    • Ask Yiming for help
• #111538: Modifiers UI Overhaul
  • Add modifier menu
    • The menu still needs reorganization, which should help the workflow.
  • Hans will look at scrolling and resizing UI views
  • Julian will look into selection for view items
• #112241: Asset Shelf: Transparent asset shelf header with background for buttons
  • Asset shelf can be done in main already
  • We might want to do more polishing before enabling it at the top, but it’s also an improvement over main

Other

• Private meeting room at Conference for UI Meeting + Guests
• UI Development Presentation/Roundtable?

[tintwotin]

Patches in need of Team-UI attention:
VSE: Sound Equalizer
VSE: Improve retiming UI
VSE: Sequencer/Preview mode incomplete

[silex]

Also:

UI: Select Through Option

UI: Automatic X-Ray

[SpookyDoom]

And my axe! I mean … and this one:

Multi-Object Properties Editing