But tthis is not inherent to Outliner
Can we get a hotkey combo for changing the active object. Or make it consistent with the 3d viewport in that shift+clicking a selected object first makes it active without deselecting it?
Thereās no easy way to change the active object from the outliner. If youāre in selected only view, and want to work on one of the objects it becomes even more important.
Dropping this here (sorry it has been posted before), taking it from how maya does it, which I have always found useful on big scenes:
| Expand or collapse the level under a node. | Click the plus  or minus  next to the node name. |
|---|---|
| Expand or collapse all levels under a node (quick way to see all nodes). | Shift + click the plus or minus next to the node name. |
The basic idea is that if you open or close a hierarchy of the outliner while keeping Shift pressed, itāll collapse or expand all the child.
Of course, without Shift, simply expand and collapse retaining the previous settings.
My2c.
L.
This is current behaviour actually
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Almost, it doesnāt open/close the level you click on:
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I think all selections in the outliner should reflect on the viewport. Like when we select with box select and the items are still inactive on the viewport.
Hiding objects beneat the parent should be an option, a toggle. Itās confusing this way.
Please please please get rid of the useless left spacing. Itās bad when using narrow columns.
Good point, I never noticed that.
@GabrielMoro if you read the proposal youāll find it is exactly what is being worked on : synced selection and a gutter on the left for box selection (although Iām not sure that one isnāt obsolete). Visibility inheritance is already there, with collections (not with parenting).
@Antaioz Yes, I am planning on making the selection mostly consistent with 3D view. The only exception I can think of will be Shift+click for range select rather than extend selection in the 3D view. But I feel it is more intuitive to have shift be for ranges because most file/list browsers use shift in that manner.
@lorenzoangeli as others have noted, this functionality is already in Blender (though it appears to not be as intuitive as it could beā¦) Iāll look into it 
@L0Lock strange. Thanks for showing how it currently functions. Iāll look into this (and add it to the todo list)
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I know this is really out thereā¦and maybe goes against the whole concept of the outliner.
But when dealing with large scenes with a lot of objectsā¦Sometimes it feels that a natural solution would be to zoom out and zoom in on objects in the list,to quickly move to that part of a large list.
Yeah you could always organize things in collections but stilll what if a collection has like 200 objects.
Basically looking at other 2d editors like UV and Node, itās a really natural way of handeling large amount of objects quickly.
Even code IDEs like Pycharm have a zoom feature,it would be cool if it had āpanā but still itās a step at the right direction.
Anyway itās just a suggestion to allow the camera to zoom in Z in this 2d editor.And eveutally when zooming in to zoom in on cursor.
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Shift for list-select is externally consistent with some similar uiās, to a degree. For instance a quick test in the tree-view of windows explorer shows you canāt shift-click to select lists of folders at different hierarchy levels (yes, Iām sure some other file browsers, probably on other OSes or ones that replace windows explorer have the ability), but Iād wager thatās because itās not as useful as it sounds. Think about it, it requires the items to happen to be in perfect order, expanded and or collapsed to the right level, and in order to be more useful than simply āselect hierarchyā, you have to want to select a subset of children and/or a bunch of objects that arenāt connected hierarchically. Most of the time this comes up, youāll want to select a subset of children of a single parent. You also canāt go and select multiple lists in different locations.
Inside blender using box-select for that is internally consistent. You can also go back and add more, remove some, open some hierarchy you forget then add those after. If we were to get the ability to scroll whilst holding down the mouse button for box select (as we can for dragging items), that would even cover the one case I can see shift-click being useful, that a subset of children, large enough that you have to scroll considerably to select them all.
Perhaps this is something that should be in the āindustry standardā keymap, which is more intended for external consistency?
Regardless, I doubt that decision will change because everyoneās enamoured with ignoring why blender does things differently lately. So, you didnāt say whether or not there would be any way to change the active object within a selection in the outliner, as there is in the viewport?
I donāt really want to go down a tangent of old vs new rhetoric- but I just want to point out that thereās no need to go into hypotheticals- there are plenty of examples of this type of interaction in software working effectively. Pretty much any other software that Blender might be part of a pipeline with behaves this way, and all of these other programs manage just fine without needing items to be in āperfect orderā, expanded or collapsed to the right level, etc. Open up Unity, UE4, Photoshop, etc. Using windows explorer as an example is just about the worst idea I can think of since itās extremely dated (in fact an update is coming out later this year, if iām not mistaken)
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If you mean quickly see objects in outliner that are way up or down in the list numpad . is the shortcut. Otherwise if you mean real zooming I donāt get how it could be useful
windows explorer was a simple example of something a vast number of people use, which illustrates why shift-clicking to select large lists in heirarchical trees isnāt as useful as it sounds.
As for the other software, that only provides reason to put it in the industry standard keymap. āmanaging just fineā hardly takes into account the number of times the feature is actually used, how often it is obtrusive rather than helpful, how often people run up against the limitations of it etc etc.
Itās a prime candidate for being on the industry standard keymap, as itās usefulness over box select mostly arrives as a result of placing box select on LMB+Drag, creating large areas where box select is obtrusive to use (as it then overlaps with click+dragging items around). This is largely why itās somewhat useful in other applications, even though it is more limited in other respects.
Itās simply the case that it is more limited to use shift+click to select lists than the current internally consistent method of box select, and we have a convention elsewhere in blender for what shift+clicking does that would be useful to have in the outliner (That I would hope makes it onto some key combo, if not shift+click).
well ever since I started working digitally Iām constantly presented with outlines or layer panels with one way interactionā¦scroll.
Itās all fine and dandy if you arenāt dealing with a lot of items in those lists.but when they become a lot,and you do need to move trough them quickly itās a pain in the ass to be scrolling up or down.
All other 2D editors follow this rule.Even the DopeSheet has pan,zoom along with the usual scrolling to the left and to the right for keyframes. And I doubt you would see this āpanning and zoomingā feature of that āitem editorā as useless.
Outliner has become very important in 2.8. Probably space in the default small Outliner Editor will be quickly filled in most of the projects becoming uncomfortable to work so the user will decide to create a new Outliner Editor area occupying all the vertical space of the monitor. Also, it might be good to have the ability to quickly expand/hide that Outliner āpanelā according to the needs of the user (to gain space when you are not working with outliner for example), as does the N panel for example. So I think that as a quick solution to this, it could be good having the Outliner in one of the N panel tabs as an alternative.
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I would like to fold/unfold multiple heirarchy with one click-drag.
In most parts of blender, like the properties panel, you can fold multiple menues by simply clicking the triangle icon and drag down. However, the last time I tried this on the outliner, it draged the whole ID block (just like for parenting).
In addition, Iāve noticed that the python API is quite poor for the outliner. I hope it supports nimble manipulation of selection, folding and other helpful operations so that add-on developers can improve the outliner by themselves.
exactly my thoughts,to me the outliner docked above the proprtties panel is of no use due to little space . You would rather have to open another on the sides to take all the vertical space. For that is crucial to be able to quicly hide and unhide it with a hotkey.
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All the best for you Google summer of code project.
For me it is very important that you are able to sort alphabetically or sort by hand in the outliner.
In the moment that is inconsistent.
Only collections can be ordered by hand shifting them where you want.
Only objects get sorted alphabetically but you canāt sort them by hand.
Viewlayer donāt get any sorting at all in the outliner.
Please adress this and make the outliner consistent! I thing the code is there you only have to use it on all types ( objects, collections, viewlayer).
Thanks
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Relly awesome that the oultiner ist getting even more love! The more stuff we can control and see via the outliner, the better!
I love the new restriction toggles for collections, with which you can control the masking and indirect lightning only attributes!
But I am not sure if the filter menu is the right place to control them.
In view of the future and all the big updates that are coming with 2.81, 2.82ā¦Iād like to brainstorm some ideas for a better system of ārestrictions togglesā or āoverridesā in a more general sense.
With overrides coming soon we will hopefully have a very powerful new system and way of working! For that we need a clear system with which we donāt loose the overview in complex scenes. We probably would like to have more of those toggles or attributes we can set per collection or even per object. It would make a lot of sense to control these overrides via the outliner.
But how are we are going to do that?
If we use the same system as today at some point we are going to end up with something like this:
Thatās why I think it is not a good idea to have those toggles predefined in the outliner and you can only control their visibility via the filter menu.
I think it would be good to be able to manually āaddā them via RMB click on a collection.
The first thing that comes to my mind is a sort of ātagā system like in Cinema4D.
You would RMB click on a collection and you would be able to add different tags. The tags themselves could be grouped. We could have groups like ārestriction tagsā, ārender tagsā, ācustom tagsā. Addons might be able to add custom tags.
Iām not sure if this is the right way but maybe someone would like to discuss this! I think itās worth discussing because the outliner needs to be prepared for this kind of stuff!
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At least on developer.blender.org developers always recommend not sharing screenshots of other softwares in design task entries to avoid legal problems. As this is an official Blender forum, perhaps the same recommendation is valid.
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