2025-04-22 User Interface Meeting

[Harleya]

User Interface Module Meeting 2025-04-22T15:00:00Z

Regular User Interface module meeting for planning and coordination. Last regular meeting was April 8th, next meeting on May 6th

Present

• Julian Eisel
• Pablo Vazquez
• Hans Goudey
• Nika Kutsniashvili
• John Kiril Swenson
• Jonas Holzman
• Harley Acheson

Since the Last Meeting

• UI: Filter visible tabs in Properties Editor #115624
• UI: Padding When Opening Menu When One is Already Open #135692
• UI: Region Scaling Edge Highlighting #136337
• UI: Do Not Open Neighboring Menu if Open One is Wide #136528
• UI: Do Not Full Hide Scroll Bars When Region Overlap #136571
• UI: FullScreen Remove Outline and Fix One Pixel Offset #137184
• UI: Increase Gizmo 3D Part Hit Size For Pens #136847
• UI: Minimum Height for Timeline Marker Operations #137312
• UI: Decrease Tablet Drag Threshold With Pen Pressure #136685
• UI: Allow Using Mac Option, Command + Arrow Input Movement #136904
• UI: Use Theme Color for Initial Window Background #137425
• UI: Consistent Pen Tilt Values #137501
• UI: Remove Initial Win32 White Flash During Startup #137488
• UI: Increase Contrast of Scroll Bar Thumb for Light Themes #137618
• UI: Reverse Pen Y Tilt Expected Direction #137636
• Fixes
  • Curve status bar stats #137199
  • Outliner: Grease Pencil layer visibility icons are grayed out #137641
  • #116937: Position and Size ICON_TYPE_VECTOR icons by float #132338
  • #137430: Improved Calculation of Minimum Vertical Area Heights #137498
  • #136998: Cannot assign shortcut to insert single keyframe operator #137080
  • #137365: Do Not Return .notdef for Text Object Control Characters #137374
  • #132028: Outliner: Skip search filtering in Lib override hierarchy #137086
  • #137186: Allow Event Handling When Cursor Outside Wide Menus #137243
  • #137466: Unable to assign shortcuts to ‘weight’ operators in Weightpaint Mode #137519
  • #137391: Do Not Restrict Marker Operations on Region Size #137399
  • #137218: Make All Tabs Visible for New Properties Area #137237

Meeting Topics

• Refactor: UI: Split uiLayout functions into separate header files
  • Move forward toward the end result of the refactor to the UI layout API, even if some of the intermediate states have compromises.

Review

• Fix #112402: Improve search menu layout #112422
  • Harley will continue review.
• UI: Add Drag & Drop Feedback on Windows #107056
  • Although this is specifically for Windows, the changes are for all platforms. Jonas will test on Mac.
• UI: Enum Tooltip Item Order #137571
  • Gray out the shortcut for consistent styling with menus. Harley will use this as prototype and push forward.
  • It would be good to add a flag to RNA properties to say that we shouldn’t display the tooltip in the UI because it’s useless.
• UI: Made viewport’s shading modes tooltips more descriptive #137699
  • We love it. Small notes for one item. Way to go Loïc Dautry!
• VSE: Change wording for one-time property reports #137579
  • Looks good, small wording change requested.

Pen/Touch Related

• UI: Highlight Region Scale Action Zone #136799
  • Pablo has notes. We probably want the movement without the opacity change.
• UI: Changes to the Hide Region Widget #118089
  • Only agreement is possible the line, but half as long as shown. But might be confusing with scroll bars. Will have to circle back to this later.

Design Discussions

• WIP: Change a number’s increment on any interface number value via the caret position
  • General agreement that we want both this and some sort of “value ladder” eventually, to address both mouse and keyboard workflows.
  • There was some disagreement about exactly how the behavior in the PR should work though. That needs some more discussion.
• UI Experiment: Snapping for View3D Sidebar #136575
  • We like. Make other similar regions use this snapping function.
• UI: Image Editor Interactive Zoom Control #117050
  • Could work for 5.0
• UI: Changes to Save Startup Dialog #134429
  • Approved. Simpler and friendly descriptions are wanted.
• UI Experiment: Checkboxes as Switches #137630
  • Agreement that there is little need. Looks worse in most cases, except maybe Extensions. So only for large changes. But could be a new toggle type added for 5.0
• General Info on Panels
• VSE: Slip Operator 2.0 #137072
  • Questions about clamp behavior when there aren’t enough frames to fill the strip
  • Consensus was to show a warning in the status bar when the above situation applies (similar to “affect only locations” warning in 3D view), replacing “clamp” option (with vertical bar separator)
• Nodes: Update Default Custom Background Color #137432
  • Lots of discussion on this. Seems like a nice improvement.
• UI: Viewport X-Ray modes disambiguation #131032
  • Mostly discussion of the proposed icon indicating this state.
• UI: Transparent Armature Bone Selection #131810
  • Some discussion.

[Kranos]

Icons color theme customization should be separate between the Outliner and Properties Tabs. Some may what the color in the outliner but want black and white on the Properties tab like the initial Blender 3.0 UI was.

Also, the gizmo visibility in the viewport should be separated from the navigation controls buttons under it. One might only want the gizmo visible and the navigation controls disabled.

[MrBeep]

Pleas add full pen support for pull-down lists like material or image textures lists. Now it’s impossible to scroll this list with pen. I suggest middle mouse button to drag/scroll this list. Also the scrollbars are missing in those lists. Please fix this asap.