One extreme alternative to this is to have only ONE dropdown menu. And make that one menu text so it has a large hit area. Then the rest of the space could used by shortcut buttons.
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Thats nifty but radical idea. I like the look of entire menu much better than the original one. It’s much cleaner IMHO.
Then make a mock-up and post here.
Oh sorry about that!
Sorry, that wasn’t meant to sound dismissive. I’m really interested in anything you want to add. I do have a more normal and conservative patch here that only proposes changes to the existing text menus. This thread is more a “flight of fancy”.
Or those who write peaces of it.
Yes, obviously… But weren’t we talking about user usage?
It’s free software. Users are as much developers as the developers.
Yes, in the same way that readers of books are as much authors as authors. Or car drivers are automotive engineers, or airline passengers are pilots. LOL
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Maybe not in Proprietary software. But every Blender user has the 4 freedoms of free-software.
- Freedom 0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- Freedom 1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- Freedom 2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
- Freedom 3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Look this up on gnu.org
Yes, I am quite familiar with open source software. LOL. But still not sure how it makes the following correct:
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I’m not talking about the Open Source Software. I’m Talking about the Free Software
By saying “Open Source” you mean that the developer decided to publish the code.
But the Free Software movement is a part of Copyleft movement. Which is a way of using Copyright laws to insure that Everybody has a right to copy or change. Like democracy of content.
For example if Blender was just simply Open Source. I would be in trouble with my VCStudio program. Because I want to have previews of Blend-Files in there. As you can see in this post. For this I’m using a script called blender-thumbnailer.py that you can find inside the Blender installation folder.
Inside this file. You can find the following comment.
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
And if you look into the GPL license it pretty much gives me all the rights I want to use this script as an official part of my program. And redistribute it or edit to to my personal needs. Yes it is Open Source. But it’s also Free Software as in Freedom. Not as in Free of Charge.
If blender with all it’s code was simply Open Source. I could not use this script.
What do I mean?
If a software is distributed under a Free Software license such as GPL. All and every user on not user is a viable developer as well. Because all and every one of them can open the code at any time and then release their changes. Even if blender.org will not know about those changes. Maybe sometimes they will need to change the name. So that’s how projects like Armory Paint or UPBGE could be done. Users just took the development of Blender into a completely different direction, changed the name and got a product that is not related to the core team of Blender Developers.
Dude, you seriously can’t teach me anything about open source that I don’t already know. And none of that off-topic screed explained what you meant by “Users are as much developers as the developers” so I am just left regretting that I ever asked you. LOL
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So I like it, but I’m having a hard time estimating how frequently I’d use the added buttons. On the flipside, an option to consolidate the topbar menus into one would match the options available in the viewport and other editors, and a way to pick and choose what things get a button up there would be kinda nifty (and it’d parallel the UI editing features you see in applications like Visual Studio).
Might need to left-align the workspace tabs, though.
It looks okay, I guess.
On a second thought, It actually looks pretty dope, most used stuff is there and an option for dropdowns. It would be nice to have that as an option in preferences.
Potentially? sure…I don’t know how it is relevant here, but sure. Anyway, when giving feedback about one’s own experience using the program, I’d say a developer is a user in that regard, so feedback would still come from users. In any case, I think this isn’t an interesting point to discuss in this thread and don’t want to derail the actual topic, so I’m going to pass on commenting about that from now on, sorry.
Can I ask: why?
Why you want to change this menus?
I can’t tell for others, but as for me I use it 1% of my working time or less.
If I want to save I just ctrl+S, save as ctrl+shift+S…
my point of view: with more icons which you barely use, the more difficult it become to navigate the program.
More actual task its N panel.
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Anything that exists can be improved. But nothing will ever be improved until you try. This experiment is part of that exploration.
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I see this as a “Tablet mode”. 
All that is left are bigger buttons to accommodate my fat fingers lol.
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