• Changes based on review by Hans Goudey.
• Fixed a minor layout issue, with the space after the chevron being a bit to small compared to the space before.

I want to share some notes to explain my concerns a bit. They all assume we keep the breadcrumbs clickable. I want to share them to build some shared understanding and language to get us on the same page. The design can go different ways, but should do so deliberately, and this should be explicit in the patch description.

• As it is, there is no way for users to know that those labels are clickable.

If you see the overlay region we have in the 3d viewport, the decoration for the menus has a solid background:

• Blender uses top-down, left-right as the navigation rules. So navigating deeper and deeper the nodegroups should (probably) be on top, not on the botom.

• The tooltip for selecting the node group is too technical although correct:

"Navigate up n levels of the active Node Tree Context Path, where n is set by steps property"

Keep in mind that users would be clicking on it, not setting the n directly. The tooltips should be thought from the user point of view.

In D10413#267797, @Dalai Felinto (dfelinto) wrote:

I want to share some notes to explain my concerns a bit. They all assume we keep the breadcrumbs clickable. I want to share them to build some shared understanding and language to get us on the same page. The design can go different ways, but should do so deliberately, and this should be explicit in the patch description.

• As it is, there is no way for users to know that those labels are clickable.

If you see the overlay region we have in the 3d viewport, the decoration for the menus has a solid background:

This is a complicated point. I tried to use the embossed buttons, which looks good, but also is not correct since its a hirarchical navigation, where the whole navigation should be recognizable as compound element not a list of Button. Also the breadcrumb is used in at least 5 editors (Geometry Nodes, Compositor, Shader Nodes, Spreadsheet, Properties), so it should be reusable in all this places in a consistent way. Which is also not simple, since the other breadcrumbs are not clickable. Im excited to see what we will decide here.

• Blender uses top-down, left-right as the navigation rules. So navigating deeper and deeper the nodegroups should (probably) be on top, not on the bottom.

As Hans noted there are some minor problems with it on the top but my general tendendy is also to put it on the top.

• The tooltip for selecting the node group is too technical although correct:

"Navigate up n levels of the active Node Tree Context Path, where n is set by steps property"

Keep in mind that users would be clicking on it, not setting the n directly. The tooltips should be thought from the user point of view.

Fully agree with that, wasn't obvious to me that this is the tool tip that is visible to the user.

In D10413#336669, @Hans Goudey (HooglyBoogly) wrote:

Currently the breadcrumbs have the same 0.902 alpha that the rest of the text in
the node editor uses.

After testing the patch it doesn't bother me as much. Even with that transparency (which doesn't come from the theme since TH_TEXT is only RGB not RGBA).

I think this should use the Node Group icon when going inside the node group. Right now it is using the Material/View Layers icon:

For Geometry Nodes this is not noticeable since we are always inside a node group.

In D10413#339594, @Dalai Felinto (dfelinto) wrote:

I think this should use the Node Group icon when going inside the node group.

Agree, I missed this when testing.

It should use NODETREE icon, to look something like:

One day we'll hopefully have a dedicated icon for geometry nodes but for the time being this change will make things more clear.

After discussing this with Ton we agreed that the breadcrumbs should be on top-left, as it is related to the current datablock which is also on top. It matches the 3D Viewport context info as well.

Breadcrumbs display can be later added to the new Overlay popover in D12886.

I think this should use the Node Group icon when going inside the node group.

I find this a bit weird, since nested shader node groups are still shader node groups, likewise for the compositor. This will be especially true for geometry nodes when it gets a proper icon, since the root node group used for the modifier and other node groups are meant to be interchangeable.
But in the interest of moving this patch forward I still made the change.

I would actually expect context_path_for_space_node() to be in the node space code, e.g. in a node_context_path.cc. It's weird to have that logic in a general UI file. Think you can just turn context_path_add_generic() into a public context_path_add()?

Yes, I like that better! I figured there might have been a reason why it was like that in the patch when I took it over.

T82812: Including node group attribute into NodeTreePath comes to my mind, any chance this can be tackled along?

In D10413#340737, @Philipp Oeser (lichtwerk) wrote:

T82812: Including node group attribute into NodeTreePath comes to my mind, any chance this can be tackled along?

Since this is mostly about drawing the existing data better, I'm not sure it would fit in this patch. I find the issue a little hard to understand also.