In Blender 2.8, we have gotten rid of the Info Editor (Space Info), which previously was used, among other things, as a way to display stats and notifications. These things need a new home. Additionally, we want to have a place to communicate to the user which hotkeys apply to the current context. Previously, we used the header for this, although it was limited to certain modal tools.
For Blender 2.8, we will add a new area for all of these things: The Status Bar.
This new area lives on the bottom of the screen, and has three main areas: Input info, Stats & Notifications:
This gives an idea of that we want to build:
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Below are some examples of the Status Bar in different situations. We would like to use it for all Editors and for modal operators too, such as Knife, which has additional modal keys:
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To make it predicable, mouse buttons need to stay fixed in place, so there's a spatial association to the mouse buttons. Other relevant modal keys can be displayed after the mouse buttons, as in the above example. Here we can use icon-like roundrects around the modifier keys to make them stand out from the text.