I think proper floating windows support is the way to go. It would be a nice alternative and, at the same time, an addition to the existing workspace system. If you don’t like the default one, you can use floating windows. You would open them up when you need em and close them when you don’t. In case you don’t like the floating windows, you would use the default workspace BUT you would have the ability to open up whatever editors/tools you need in additional floating windows if or when you need em. This addition would also be useful for those who use sub-FHD resolutions. Screen space is a very valuable real estate there.
A few examples:
You are working on a scene. You are adjusting shaders, uvs, trying different rendering settings in the viewport.
But all of a sudden you need Outliner. Instead of ‘redefining’ (splitting) your existing workspace, you can simply press Ctrl+Shift+F9 (or the key of your choice) and the Outliner will pop up in a floating window:
As you can see it’s not messing up your current layout. You can do whatever you want and then close or minimize it and go on with whatever you do without any problems.
Another example: You are in the ‘Viewport Shading’ mode and you want to compare two shaders. You already have one ‘Shader Editor’ open, but to open another one you would have to adjust and split your current workspace which would trigger re-rendering of the scene, which you don’t want.
You can simply press Ctrl+Shift+F3 and another ‘Shader Editor’ will pop up in a floating resizable window without triggering re-rendering and messing up your current layout.
As you can see this is a win/win kind of approach. Even people that hate pop ups and floating windows would occasionally use them because of their sheer convenience.
Pop ups have a draw back when it comes on utility of them as these windows will get hidden when you click on the viewport or an active Workspace we know this happens a lot in photoshop and even with blender user preferences windows, they get hidden just by a click so to avoid that I made a collapsible form of it and I am thinking that we can combine your idea and my idea to make a better ui like the workspaces will be collapsible and also you can move it where you want and even you can resize the workspace as per your need and you can also pin it on the screen and I am also working on a docking feature of this thing so that we don’t need to have both old and new ui together one should be able to do both the things and complete pop ups should be there to the file browser only and this type of ui will avoid us changing the tabs each time
Can you name a few of such software please, as I know the other softwares which have this feature are pretty good at their utility, so your point not what it should be like, you should think that this is having significant uses like if someone wants to unwrap a mesh so he would need to switch tab then reside the workspace and then he will go to edit mode and he need to unwrap from there then he again needs to resize it then he will go back to his tab after doing so long thing but this can be quicker by my idea
yeah i saw that and this good if it stays on top like that it is a great part to be connected with my idea as your one should be included it seems pretty meaningful
Draw popups and hide the interface under it is forbidden in blender UI/UX design. Maybe is one of the first guidelines of blender UI.
I don’t know, but the proposal appear to me no-sense, because you have the same with workspaces (with the same number of clicks and break in same way the workflow), but you don’t want to use workspaces, so you need to change all the program UX/UI that use millions of people.
who is hiding it,please try to check the differences in the whole thing not just the idea, if you do so this will make no sense to you but if you see the details then you may realize the significance of the idea so please check it again and please wait until i make those changes which you want
While I do like the idea of having the viewport basically fullscreen and having the remaining editors called via little buttons discretely placed on the sides, I wonder… Where are all the editors ?
I am an animator, having a timeline with key ticks and playback tools is basically vital to see all the time i am animating, and additionally I need the graph during all the time I am actively splining.
So IMHO, it would still be great to have some form of docking (I love my timeline taking all my screen’s length). And, since it would be very cluttering to have one button for every editor on the viewport and not everyone uses the same set of editors all the time anyway (modelers don’t use animation editors, animators don’t use modeling editors, etc). How about letting the user chose which editors have a button on the viewport, and have a full-fledged editor menu like the one already existing ?
I really like the ‘everything at a glance’ feature of the current non-overlapping areas paradigm of blender. And I despise popups for information display. they are ok to quickly toggle stuff, but floating windows obscuring the 3d viewport (or any other editor) for longer times are awful imho.
And I think most users who have used blender for some time agree.
If any of this were ever implemented it would have to be strictly optional. Imho the only useful thing to implement would maybe be some python api to open any editor in a floating temporary popup window, so an addon could be written for the people that want this. Maybe that’s already possile, I don’t know, I’m not experienced with the UI code.
Avoiding popups is a core part of the Blender UI since the 2.5 rework. Think of Blender as implementing the “Object→Action→Settings” paradigm: select an object (if appropriate to perform an action on), perform the action with initial default settings, and then tweak settings as necessary, using the automatic “live” redo, until the result looks like what you want. Popups force you to guess what the result is going to be before you see it, which just slows you down.
The tiling window manager is also a core part of the Blender UI, right since 1.0. It lets you switch editors just by moving the mouse, minimizing the need to click.
