This is a design document related to recent patches to make changes to the Status Bar and Statistics display in Blender. Several patches will be submitted, so this document serves as an overview of the main reasons why, and the bigger picture of how things fit together.
Currently, the right hand side of the Status Bar is filled with a statistics section:
The issues with this are:
- This is only relevant for the 3D View. If, for example, you are using the Sequencer, you still get a permanent display of the number of vertices in the 3D View, which serves no useful purpose in that case
- While useful in some cases, for things like making game assets with polygon budgets, we don't need to permanently always show this information
- It's hard to read visually, with many abbreviations and pipe symbols in between items
- It takes up a lot of permanent room, which could be used to better notifications and also just to show the keyboard input for complex operators
For the above reasons, we would like to make a few changes:
1: Move 3D statistics to the 3D View
Moving the stats to the 3D View allows us to make sure this information only appears where it is relevant.
It also makes it possible to list the statistics in a more readable way that resembles a list:
An important change here, is that this information should not be enabled by default. If you need to see this, it can be enabled as an overlay option:
2: Status Bar changes
With the above change, that leaves the Status Bar with two items: The version number and the amount of memory used.
The version number is mainly something that tutorial makers could optionally enable if they wish, and is not necessary to keep visible by default. While using the app, you don't need a constant reminder of the current Blender version.
The amount of memory used can be useful in rare cases, but usually the system process monitor will give you a more useful display of this information. For this reason we should hide this by default, but we can still include in option to show it:
Right-clicking on the Status Bar here will allow you to show these items optionally, similar to adding items to a system tray.
Because the memory used is hidden by default, we can also include the option to show the amount of VRAM used, which Blender knows but is simply currently not shown.
When we *do* show this information, we can do so in a slightly nicer way than before, by removing the pipe symbols, which broke the spacing between items:
This is much easier to read.
These changes will leave the bottom right side of the Status Bar blank by default. This is intentional. This means we can move the notifications and progress bars here instead, which would allow us to use better notifications, always appearing in a consistent place, without interfering with the keyboard shortcuts:
