The panel tabs for addons should never shrink. Scroll instead

Is there no solution in this regard yet? This is a problem that has been carried over from old versions of Blender, for example also with T panel tabs.
Would it be possible at least to show the full name of the tab when you Mouse Over any of the tabs?. Maybe also show the name of the selected tab as a title at the beginning of the panel.

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I agree but also dont, since everybody seems to want to make their add-on a panel. Hardly any add-on devs first checks if their add-on should be in tools, views or any other of the existing ones.

If a panel is massive and lots of sub-panels, then i agree. I will also go over a couple of my add-ons and adjust the behavior and bring them under Tools and View as much as possible

Many people have awaited for this problem to be solved since 2.79. There are also problems with sidebar design, but this topic seems to be more urgent since itā€™s directly related to usability. I wish I could help, but I donā€™t have any experience in programming. Isnā€™t there any patch or developer consensus happening over this topic?

We really do need scrollable tabsā€¦ Finding names without seeing names is really frustrating.

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The N Panel is a disaster, but it also speaks for me to a general problem with the UI and that is to much freedom of choice, sounds strange and in this modern world silly, but it is true.

Third party developers have the freedom to put their addons almost anywhere they like, whilst that in of itself is fine it does lead to a cluttered and unorganised UI.

The UI in Blender is one of the biggest complaints about Blender from those coming from other 3d packages.

Most of us run widescreen monitors and thus putting the n panel on the side with the title rotated 90 degrees is crazy, its the smallest screen real estate and also the place that everything is dumped that does not already have a coded place to be.

Switching on and off addons per use does not address the issue it mearly skiirts around it as does workspaces as well.

The n panel first needs to be able to place it top, bottom, left or right, it needs to be editable, but also Blender Devs need to force third party developers to us certain paradims when creating their addon UI.

There is such a thing as to much choice and Blender whilst very flexible sometimes does give to much.

If you right click on header there is operator called ā€œFlip to Bottomā€, right click on it, add some shortcut (for example F5). Now you can flip sidebar or toolbar from left to right with F5 while mouse hovering over them.

Everything you say is valid, this is is just some hidden vestigial functionality for flipping ui elements from before 2.80 rework.

I did not know that, thanks very much indeed. I am not a prodominantly Blender user, i have some specific task thats i do it it, most sim work, so i am by no means an expert, but i fully understand why those coming from Max, Maya, Houdini and the like complain about the UI, it really can be messy at times.

Ok i can move the header to top or bottom but im not seeing how to move the n panel to the top or bottom, is this possible.

sadly not yet, but would be cool indeed. Iā€™ve made the example of wanting to move the toolbar to the bottom, sort of similar to silo before for an example and I can definitely see how the properties panel could work sort of similar to ribbon UI at the top.

Can never have too much freedom tho.

The problem is actually pretty much the exact opposite. Right now, the developers do not have enough freedom, so the N panel has became universal kitchen sink for pretty much every addon. Many addons would be much better suited to have their own editor space, or their own properties editor tab.

Currently, the addon developers can mostly just do N panel addons, some limited derivations of the existing editors, such as node editor, operators, and tools (in the tool panel). Many of the existing addons would also make sense to be turned into a tool, so their properties exist only when the tool is active, but old habits die hard.

The N panel tabs still could use some better UI/UX solution but I think the underlying issue is a bit more important to solve. First and foremost, addon developer should get an API to be able to create their own editors. Second, they should get some API to spawn new tabs in the properties editor. That alone would help a lot in terms of spreading the addon load from the N panel to the rest of Blender UI.

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Well from what i see on my screen they can put stuff at the top, at the bottom on the sides, the problem is after a while your screen real estate gets smaller and smaller.and thats before we talk about popups and pie menus. It starts to look terrible i can understand why some people see the Blender UI as a bit of a mess.

Indeed using the N-Panel as a dumping area for everything is not good at all, but many developers tools go nowehere near the n panel so it proves that with the right coding you can avoid the n panel all together.

In reply to @mcolinp 's suggestion:

There have been countless of suggestions to redesign the sidebar (N panel) or to adress the ā€œaddons tabs clutterā€.

Maybe one day, a UI redesign will be brainstormed by the Blender UI team, but in the meantime, I do think that your proposal is a nice compromise and would really make Blender usersā€™ life easier.

I adhere to your solution (to give tabs a height equal to the length of their text and let the user the ability to scroll tabs and if the 3Dview canā€™t display all tabs (because there are too many addons), then display a vertical scrollbar next to the tabs to scroll them).

I can be wrong, but I donā€™t think it would require lots of lines of code or many patches to make it happen (compared to a whole sidebar redesign). I hope your solution gets implemented soonish (not next week/month of course butā€¦ I mean, not in years either). I think Blender users are tired of this issue that has been annoying them for years.

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This patch āš™ D15395 UI: Scroll sidebar category tabs

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Holy cow! wow. :open_mouth: I am speechless. Itā€™s about time.
Thank you @Leul_XYN for pointing me out to this patch and thank you a thousand times Guillermo (guishe) if you follow this thread.

First of all: Nice one. Thank you! :smiley:

Second of all: How did I never realize that you can just switch through the side menues with Ctrl-Wheel as well instead of klicking the tabs?

Because the CTRL-Wheel is the new patch, so that didnt exist yet. It already worked with the wheel mouse, has been there quite some time actually.

The ui has quite some nice tricks and shortcuts. I also like the one using CTRL drag corner to swap places of the panels.

How soon can this D15395 be merged?

https://twitter.com/BlenderToday/status/1636039841719754755