Currently the operator search popup has a few issues:
- You can't search for UI names, meaning menu items such as Clear Seam aren't searchable (because it's internally just an option for Mark Seam)
- You cannot right-click on search items to add shortcuts or to add them to the Quick Favorites
- You cannot see in which menu the item lives
- We often show operators that don't work in a given context
We can solve this by fundamentally changing the way we search. Instead of searching all operators, we can simply search the menus instead. This means we could search for 'Clear Seam' and find it, and it also means we can tell users which menu it is in, and we can make it so the search results act like normal menu entries with properly working context menus.
At the same, we can improve the search UI a bit:
Before typing, instead of listing all operators, just keep the UI more compact, like so:
When the user searches, the popup expands:
We can now search for UI menu names in addition to the operator names, so we can find things like Clear Seam:
For each search result item selected, we highlight the menu where it lives. In this case Clear Seam is in the Edge menu:
Because we are just showing menu entries, we can now also support the normal menu item context menus, so items can be added to Quick Favorites and assigned to shortcuts:
Layout
Many menu titles need the leading menus to give context. But to make it more readable, we can grey those leading menus out:
