Tested just for you - WIP toolbar editing 😬

[brian (Brian Gillespie)]

@Helvetosaur

Warning - long post…

Thanks for taking the time to write this. It deserves an equally long response, so here goes.

But first, a bit about where we are with this project. There’s a lot of new code here, and the UI for it is not yet done. As you’ve discovered, it’s gross.

First, our intentions

There are a few new features coming to Rhino 8 that are designed to fix a few very painful long-standing problems in Rhino.

1. Cross Platform: This new toolbar and window management system works on both Windows and Mac. On Mac, you didn’t have much if any customization available in Rhino 7 and older.

2. Toolbars Stay Put: This change makes it so that all the dockable stuff in Rhino can live in any of the containers. It also is stored in a way that when you close Rhino and re-open it, you get what you had. For some people, Rhino 5, 6, and 7, never really worked this way.

3. Delivering Updates, Not Trashing Customization: Another thing we’re trying to fix is the ability to add new tools to Rhino without trashing everyone’s custom RUI files. This is actually a big deal. Let’s say we find a bug in the Circle button: we shipped with a macro -_Coircle and it just didn’t work. And you built a new custom layout of your own based on our default RUI. In the past, if you wanted the fix, you had to know to look for it and update your RUI. Now, because your changes to the RUI are stored locally as a set of changes (rather than a whole RUI file), we can modify -_Coircle to be -_Circle and both the default and all your changes will be updated.

4. Combining Tools: It used to be that if you had the VRay plugin loaded and you wanted your own new toolbar that had some Rhino tools and some VRay tools, you’d get a bunch of copies of those tools in your new toolbar. Now, Rhino will save links back to the original RUI files (for much the same reason as above) so that the original authors can update and change their RUIs.

And finally, if you’re one of the very rare people who design whole new layouts for Rhino (and, I know, you are) there are tools for un-linking everything and embedding it in the RUI.

Second, Our priorities

I got my hands on this set of new tools about six months ago. At that point, just opening Rhino felt foreign. All the styling was confused, things didn’t line up, there was a waste of pixel space, etc. Dark mode didn’t work (and still kinda doesn’t).

There were a bunch of things that didn’t work when you simply opened Rhino and tried to use it. We are very nearly done cleaning all of that up. And it’s our top priority - because using Rhino is way more important than customizing it for most of our users. I’m not saying customization isn’t important - but I think it’s not controversial to say that using Rhino is more important than customization.

I intentionally pulled people’s focus away from toolbar button creation, workspace creation, and layout editing in favor of straight-up default user experience.

And now, we’re turning toward some of those more subtle things like what you’ve described. And yes, it’s far from being done.

@Helvetosaur

“Create new file and link”

I was just talking to John about this, and wondered what on earth “and link” means? Why isn’t this just “New…”? Logged as RH-73818

@Helvetosaur

Why isn’t there an access button from Options>Appearance>Toolbars?

Maybe there should be. I’m not sold on that idea yet… doing so means you have a modal options dialog with another Toolbars dialog on top, and then all the editing you do happens on top of those two windows, pretty well obscuring what you’re working on? Or am I missing something here?

@Helvetosaur

Funny thing, in default, even though the top and left sidebars are showing, NONE of the toolbars in Toolbar Layout are actually checked in the list…

That looks like a bug. I’m not sure those checkboxes actually are hooked to anything. Since toolbars can belong to multiple containers now, a checkbox is kinda nonsensical. It looks like you can cause toolbars to appear with those checkboxes, but they don’t seem to have a visibility correspondence: RH-73819

@Helvetosaur

I’m going to add a new toolbar – I call it MyFirstToolbar. Then I get to this window:

The intention here, which clearly didn’t work very well, was to help guide you through the process of creating a toolbar and adding buttons to it. If you were doing this in the context of the default RUI, I think it’d make more sense. But since you started with nothing (an empty RUI) it’s less sensible.

@Helvetosaur

And just hit Finish to hopefully get my toolbar. Miracle of miracles, I actually get the toolbar. Not so miraculous, you can’t make it a single row, what you see below is as small as it gets vertically.

Logged as RH-73820

@Helvetosaur

So now, I have a button in Recon1.rui that links to a toolbar in default. Hard to wrap my head around that.

Yep, that’s by design. So that we can update that linked toolbar and you don’t have to care. Glad you love it

@Helvetosaur

As has been mentioned in other threads, the commands in buttons can no longer be edited directly.

This is currently in the category of internal conflict. Some of us agree with you. Some of us don’t. I’m not sure where we’ll land ultimately - but even if we keep the “buttons reference macros” concept, we’ll streamline the UI so that it’s not so many clicks to do things.

All the rest, I just agree with, and we have bugs logged for them.

@Helvetosaur

The only way to have two different scripts LMB/RMB is to DUPLICATE the macro you made with the first script and then edit the duplicate and put the second script. This is beyond crazy.

Thanks: RH-73821

@Helvetosaur

PLEASE UNLINK EVERYTHING !!!

I refer you to Rhino 7. Everything is unlinked there. But seriously, we’re going to continue to fix bugs and make it better - it might be a few months yet, however.