Spacebar menu feedback

  1. In 2.7 I use space to open the search window. In 2.8 space instead opens the spacebar menu which is fine. However it makes opening the search window harder.

I propose having a second spacebar press open the search menu which shouldn’t affect anything negatively since pressing spacebar when the spacebar menu is open does nothing anyway.

Having double space be the search menu would be useful for those used to 2.7 spacebar search while still having the possibility to use the spacebar menu’s other functions.

  1. The spacebar menu opens with the cursor over the selected tool which feels very awkward because it makes it impossible to select tools using muscle memory.

In normal Blender operations this is preferred behavior because you might want to quickly get to the same category, for example after adding a curve using shift+a, you might want to add a second curve.

The spacebar menu tools are different though. After selecting the Grab tool, pressing spacebar again opens with the cursor selection on Grab which isn’t very helpful because you obviously wanted to change the tool, so why is the easiest selection to make (press spacebar, don’t move mouse, click) essentially useless?

I propose having the spacebar menu always open with the item under the cursor being a certain tool, in this iteration probably the Cursor tool (top tool that’s not the spacebar search). By doing this you would turn the spacebar menu into an absolute tool where you always know how far away you need to move the cursor to select a certain tool.

This does cause problems though. The first problem is that if you were to use the Cursor tool location as the starting point you could run out of space if you often select new tools. The second problem is that you essentially waste the upward movement possibilities with the absolute anchor at the top. Both of these problems could be fixed by having the absolute start position being in the middle of the spacebar menu, around where the Grab tool is now.

So to summarize: this behavior would be like starting with the Grab tool selected, but each time (even after changing to a new tool) you would end up with the cursor under the Grab tool, which is useful if that’s the main tool you use (you would of course put the most used tool as the start position). You would always know how much to move the mouse in order to select a certain tool in contrast to now where you have to look at where you’re starting from and lose any possibility of learning through muscle memory.

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