Block Category List takes up too much space

[JohnsonMyton]

What Happened

Hello! Love the idea of the project, wanted to add one of my first, instant thoughts. The amount of space for the actual blocks is pretty small, and on my students computers it's even smaller. One of the issues I think is that the gifts take up too much space -

I think, to make it more compact, you should remove the "first" word of groups of blocks, like "transform" and "graphics", I think these are taking up too much space.

How to Reproduce

N/A

Operating System

No response

Logs or command-line output

No response

Anything else?

No response

[manuq]

@JohnsonMyton thanks for your student's feedback! Yes, I think this can be improved by implementing subcategories. Currently the first word is being repeated to simulate subcategories in the single hierarchy, taking too much horizontal space.

[dsd]

@JohnsonMyton what's the specs of the students machines? And the screen resolution?

Excited to hear you are considering this for use in education context. Could you reach out to me at drake@endlessos.org - I would love to know more of the context. We're also developing this for learners but haven't manged to expose many students to this yet because of summer break.

[cassidyjames]

A quick and easy change here might be moving the category to the end of the line… so you'd have:

Lifecycle
Position | Transform
Rotation | Transform
Scale | Transform
Modulate | Graphics
Visibility | Graphics
Viewport | Graphics
Sounds
Input

Then users who collapse the width of that column can still see the most useful bit.

If we want to get more interesting, we could consider relying on an icon + color to group them into their respective groups instead, dropping the category from the label (and/or moving it to a tooltip). This would allow us to better use the space while still keeping a pretty strong association between blocks of the same category.

The GNOME UI icons are public domain, so we could lean on those for each category. Something like this:

[manuq]

@cassidyjames what do you think about the implementation done by @DoomTas3r here? #270

I have tried it and although it helps, I still find odd to have 2 columns in the tab:

If you think this is an improvement we should merge. Thanks @DoomTas3r for your contribution!

[manuq]

@cassidyjames please also point @DoomTas3r to the SVGs of the GNOME UI icons so the current placeholders can be replaced.