When I was moving for my student exchange I kept asking myself - Should I take my 27-inch monitor with me, or I will survive for one semester on my 17,3" laptop? Of course, I left monitor at home to save it from 11-hour bus ride.
The reason why I mention it is because we always think, that we need a bigger screen, higher resolution. But really there is also a job to better utilize the space we already have - especially when we don’t have any 4k, 32-inches screens in our reach.
To achieve that, we need some changes in how toolbars are docking. Right now there is no way to avoid dividing space in manner showed below. I doubt if anyone needs that wide space for the commands, but it takes precious space from the right column.
There are a lot of spaces in this UI which are wasted. For example panel with File, Edit, View could be solved similar to how it’s done in Photoshop - pure profit.
For me, the worst part of working on a too small screen is how little space is for the layers, named views and properties, display etc. underneath. Obviously, I can’t have one big panel on the right - waaay too much clicking and switching between panels. The most profit brings option where we can treat these two spaces separately and arrange them as we want. We can have even 22% more space for toolbars on the right, on higher resolution screen I could divide this space into 3 pieces.
What are your opinions in that manner? Show me your configurations, and let’s discuss! I really hope that we can have some changes for those who really need that, others can stay with their old configurations.
I especially like the possible space gain for the panels on the right. I have pretty similar configuration. I often have a lot of layers and but at the same time I can’t resign on having another set of panels (with properties, materials, etc.). Big layer list and fully functional properties panel underneath would be great!
@JohnM
It’s now or never ;). I needed to revive my old topic. I’m very excited that you are working on UI improvements. Unfortunately, it’s still impossible to dock the right column as I showed. I think it’s a good idea to have as much as possible room for the right-side docked containers.
Take a look at what is happening in the “productivity” laptops market, more and more of them have 16:10 screen proportions, 16:9 is not tall enough to work comfortably on the small screens. Almost always there is not enough vertical space rather than horizontal.
Right now I can’t prioritize my right column over the top bar.
You can try going to Options/Advanced and turning the UseEntireWidthForTopBand off. This will make the left and right containers extend to the top and bottom of the main frame Window.
