Blender.org

First off, I'm by no means a 3d professional or a blender expert. That said, I have learned enough to do mesh modeling in blender 2.49. In checking out 2.5.2, it looks like quite a bit of progress and change is happening. Many changes simply take some time getting used to, but one change in 2.5 confuses me greatly --- the new space menu ---

What is the purpose and rationale behind the new space-menu?

I can see the benefit of the isearch functionality of the new 2.5 menu, but I don't see the purpose of of the rest of the new widget. It's a tiny window into a very very large set of options without any organization I can understand. (alpha? contextual?)

The old widget's simple hierarchy was a great and simple way to use blender as a semi-novice. The keyboard shortcuts were visible. The menu was adjusted based on context. When in doubt, I would hit space and go searching for what I was looking for in the hierarchy. The new menu doesn't seem to offer me that same functionality because scrolling it is very inefficient and confusing. If I don't know what to type, I don't see what purpose it has. I also find it harder to switch between mouse usage and full two handed typing to use the new 2.5 space-menu-search vs 2.49's space-heirarchy-menu.


Am I missing something?

Tell me why you love the new space menu and you never look back (assuming you actually used the old one).

Is there a way to get the old 2.49 style space menu?

It seems to me that the new widget is primarily a search result for the space-search. Have contributers considered providing a 2.49 style hierarchial menu which only turns into the new 2.5-style 'search results' when you actually type a search into the box?

Thanks for any and all thoughtful responses.

Yes, you ARE missing something
The Space bar opens a search box, you can search for ANY command in Blender, not just the ones that were previously in the space menu... This is really convenient.
The "ADD" menu is Shift-A now.

Though I would prefer if the ADD menu remained as "Space" and the Search thingy could be Shift-A...

This does not match my experience. When I press space in 2.49, I receive a menu whose top level contains ALOT more than adding. It appears to be a hierarchal subset of many useful functions. The first level includes:

Add
Edit
Select
Transform
Object
View
Render

The 2.5 shift-A "add menu" only contains the operations under the "add" part of the above menu. Where is the menu that contains all of them?

Please see my thread here for illustration:

http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 8337#78337

I acknowledged the utility of the search function, when I want to search. My question was about the utility of the 'search results scroller of everything in blender' which is visible when you have an empty search box. Read my post above for my proposal.

FreeMind wrote:Yes, you ARE missing something
The Space bar opens a search box, you can search for ANY command in Blender, not just the ones that were previously in the space menu... This is really convenient.
The "ADD" menu is Shift-A now.

Though I would prefer if the ADD menu remained as "Space" and the Search thingy could be Shift-A...

Hi,

The old 2.4x "toolbox" was meant to come back for 2.5 as well, and even better, configured by a python script! It's on the todo, we also want to have a nice gesture based radial menu, which will use similar code.

-Ton-

ton wrote:Hi,

The old 2.4x "toolbox" was meant to come back for 2.5 as well, and even better, configured by a python script! It's on the todo, we also want to have a nice gesture based radial menu, which will use similar code.

-Ton-

Is this still on the todo?, the radial menu thing more specifically.