Make menus more readable

[leecaste]

Right now menus have their section titles dim grey and all the commands/tools are bright grey.

Also non of the commands/tools seem to be organized in any specific way, separated in groups by lines so everything looks too tight and noisy.

I propose making the section titles bright, bold and one point bigger than the rest and the commands/tools dim grey.

When the cursor hover over each command/tool, it gets highlighted as it happens right now but it also gets bright and bold like the section titles.

Also all the commands/tools are sorted alphabetically, this makes them more intuitive.

Additionally menus like the Deform menu have redundant text because most deformers appear in the Create, Edit and Paint Weights sections so I also propose a compact version for these cases although this should be considered carefully as this may break consistency with the rest of the menus that have titled sections.

By the way, when undocked, the top title gets blocked by the window title, this should be fixed.

[BenediZ]

Yes, same by the way for Channel Box: Each time I am searching through the tiny grey words for "Break connections" or "Mute Keys" in the Channel Box. It's not possible to set a hotkey for them. Would be so good to have there as well the ability to mark or customize menus. other voices here, and there have been more in recent years: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-ideas/modes-for-attribute-editor-as-an-alternative-to-floating-w... https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-ideas/redesign-the-attribute-editor/idi-p/7960097

[BenediZ]

And I had suggested this 1,5 years ago: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-ideas/attribute-editor-clearer-readability-of-sub-items-sub-tabs...

[BenediZ]

Similar request: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-ideas/why-doesn-t-autodesk-support-people-who-have-poor-eye-sigh...

[chokmah]

Great suggestion and design proposal imo. !

[leecaste]

Very interesting links, I also was thinking about redoing the Attribute Editor to make it more intuitive/readable. I may take a look at those ideas and post something.

[NateLikesTea]

Completely agree with this post, and these are great, reasonable design changes.  Section titles should absolutely be bright and in bold, as you've suggested.

I was unsure of your proposed "compact" menu at first, but I've come around and it completely makes sense.  The only idea I'd offer is to make sure that there is only one submenu.  For example, if you select "blendshape," then one submenu pops up, with "Create" and "Edit" being section titles (bright and bold), with the respective commands listed under.

[leecaste]

@NateLikesTea Thank you!

The compact version came along while I was making the other ones as in the menu I used as an example there were a lot of redundancies and it was starting to get a little annoying but it´s just a suggestion about cleaning up stuff to make Maya feel a bit more lightweight and intuitive.

I´m more interested in the main topic of this post than the compact version, but thank you very much for the idea, sadly getting rid of redundancies can be applied alomst everywhere inside Maya.

[leecaste]

Thanks @Anonymous , I´m glad you like it. Let´s see if this idea is taken in consideration for a future update as the newest Maya release didn´t address this issue.