For real? Tell me how please!
Worse!
New users get lost, having them switched to another tab and now they don’t know how to switch to the normal UI.
Having the whole UI change every time you click a button is a wrong idea imho.
1 click to select a tab, cost you as much as 1 click to open a toolbar from a button on the “standard” UI…
Everything accessible. All the times.
Can confirm, would not be pleased.
And that’s because most of what beginners consider to be Rhino’s interface is actually just a bunch of superfluous graphic design elements that are really there as training wheels while you learn the actual UI design of Rhino which is the command line; the purpose of the ctrl, shift, and tab keys; and the three trillion tabs in the properties panel (That honestly do need some cleaning up, but at least its better than the endless list that AutoCAD has).
I agree that it looks nicer than the Windows UI, but I hated the command line implementation and its stupid tiny checkboxes for changing command options.
I think your effort is a good starting point, given some criticalities that have been pointed out (like gray-on-gray lack of contrast for readability).
Quoting simply because I think it would be great to have a couple of things on the Layer table:
Icons for DisplayModes are an interesting option, but maybe a double-edged sword for custom display modes (making an icon for each mode might be a drag for users with many custom modes… 
), but for sure a reorganization that makes the pop-up menu more compact would be absolutely appreciated, since mine is already breaking through the roof and basement of my screen!
As general considerations, I think the balance between interface clarity and personalization (flexibility) is hard to strike, but maybe we can agree on a couple of points to strive for:
One highly overlooked thing here…
Rhino has the built in ability to extensively customize the UI and the icons to whatever you prefer.
For McNeel to try and make a “new UI” that will make all our users delighted is a suicide mission for any dev who was naive enough to think they can do it. There is only one guaranteed outcome. a few people will love it, the rest will want to burn our building down.
Y’all are a passionate bunch, the only way we can make you all happy is to give you the tools you need to make it exactly how you want it to be and let you make it your own.
Ideally, and have it save those tweaks, be able to move them to another machine, share them with other users, and also not reset it randomly…But I digress…
There have been countless, and I do mean countless attempts by users to “revamp the UI” over the last 2 and half decades…and exactly none of them caught on. The only one that has lasted 25 years? the one you see in front of you today.
If a a better solution comes along and we see that there is a massive adoption rate? you better believe we’ll move towards that, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Now I have to go back to pushing to get marking menus into v9 now that the AD patent has expired.
as you were…
What are marking menus?
Ah but we are thinking about it, cause you changed so many buttons 
In the future we just have AI do the coding 
I have a colleague that’s always disliked the icons since they started in V5 
I used to have a bunch of custom ones, but V6 messed them up and I just started using default.
But lately I’ve been doing more macros, and today am face with building a custom pallet to email a colleague. Hopefully I can get them what they want to work.
I don’t - and I never had… To me the tabs are just bad UI design.
Yep!
I never understood how that got to be a patent when it’s basically just a rip off of the menus from The Sims.
@rhinoui
Don’t get discouraged by the opposite opinions. You did a very nice job with the icons, I hope more icons could be replaced so people who would agree to have less eye-popping icons (that they maybe rarely use anyway) but have a calmer interface will buy your theme. - I’m talking about icons inside panels and such. I bought it just out of curiosity, but I’m not a fan of the dark Rhino theme, so I will try it again once you will craft a light theme.
Demanding a complete UI appearance overhaul is one extreme, but defending the status quo and doing nothing about the clown panel is another. This is the most patchwork piece of GUI I have ever seen. It looks like every row was done by a different person and they were merged 5 minutes before the deadline 
But hey, the sliders are sliding.
There is a lot of aligning work to do in the Rhino UI, sometimes it’s hurting aesthetics and sometimes usability. And no one can do it besides McNeel. Various padding and thicknesses of elements were slowly improved over time, but there are still many hours of fiddling with it to be done. I hope it’s not being worked on by the same people who write more critical/strategic things.
This one below was pushed to the Rhino 9
There are also purely usability problems/wishes.
Since we have containers now. Every panel should be designed to be comfortable in a small, docked version and a big floating one. Select Color dialog is maybe even trying to be too smart in adjusting to different sizes
This happened when they wanted to change the Clown Panel.
Many CAD systems use the term Marking Menus instead of radial menus.
Is this about the default state of the ui? Because you can customize quite alot.
Things like “who uses tabs” depends on the user in the end and even those can be custom, i find myself using them every project as well as the command prompt if thats ever seen as useless
Id suggest just open Rhino and explore the options alot give instant feedback when changing values
Pascal and I used to chat about this quite a bit. It ended up being useful for people working with single maximized viewports so they could jump from one projection to another.
Hi Steve,
I was referring to the different tool group tabs in the upper standard toolbar group, not the view tabs at the bottom.
marking menus way predate the sims.
and they are much different than a “radial menu”
I don’t know whether I’d consider that to be much different from a radial menu especially when it’s being compared to a radial menu that’s kind of a straw man in the way it’s designed.
f you consider the effectiveness of a well designed radial menu, the value seems to be in the ability to make marks, which feels like it really requires you to be using a stylus. And how do you deal with the accuracy of marks as elements in a menu grow larger? And how do you deal with marks that that have consecutive parallel segments?
The problem is the infinitely many interpretations of what the solutions would be.
True, but some users are stubborn and think they should already know how to use Rhino automatically. 
They think it’s not intuitive if they can’t figure it out on the fly, first time clicking buttons. 
I think they’ve changed it many more than 4 times between just the yrs 2009-2022 of which I’m thoroughly familiar. It only took them 13 yrs to achieve features they should’ve already had decades ago.
Now that they’ve done so, there’s no point in paying upgrades for the foreseeable future. Unless someday they gain ‘perspective projection’, then might be worth the upgrade, even though they should’ve achieved even that also decades ago. One can dream.
lol someday I might share info about Mastercam’s 5 ways they use coordinate systems, but I too would rather learn how to grow lettuce and teach that instead. 
those are the same picture
Yes redundant elements and scattered settings could still be improved. Although things seem much improved since V5. And I really like the new ‘advanced’ dialogue.
Indeed, but I still have to learn the opennurbs datakit thingamajig and create eto frameworks.
Yeah, but the command prompt visibility still disappears after each update and/or randomly.
There’s infinitely many possibilities. 
exactly 
I’m really curious
And the menus aren’t resizable and repositionable and they disappear after one selection is made. 
You can patent anything, so doesn’t really mean much when someone says they got a patent. They’re just a license to a lawsuit, and a receipt to wasted money/time etc. Not to mention notifying to the world how to make it or design around it basically.
Me neither. Can’t even change the colors to red or green, on the buttons.
If the “conventional linear menus” didn’t disappear after every selection, then it would save time and clicks. Simple idea, no one has ever implemented that I know of. Might as well patent the idea, except now it’s public domain. 
