UX: Interface indication for current tool state, quick tool access by default

[simonrepp]

Hi,

Thanks for the recent bugfixes, the most obvious and basic workflows now work without crashes. \o/

Over the coming weeks/months I would like to recreate the tool icons I made for omm, this time with omm. On the one hand so that the icon generation process and creation consistently uses omm :+1:, on the other hand, as a very basic hands-on usecase for omm! As I mentioned I am intrigued by the potential that lies in omm, but as of yet, in practice, I see more deterrents than incentives for anyone to use omm (including me :)), but even so I'd like to help you to work these out. I will take the time to really engage with omm on this practical usecase (the icons) and provide you with the most important insights that come up from a user perspective. I will also use my best judgement as a developer to provide you with feedback that points towards things that are actually solvable (i.e. trying to stay as much with simple tweaks and small, economic proposals for additions as possible).

That said, one of the things I currently experience as most irritating and confusing when working on simple things in omm is a lack of intuitively accessible user feedback regarding the current tool state. I need to mostly rely on my memory to tell me what might happen when I click in the viewport (and that feels very irritating in practice). Primarily I see two aspects to this that will solve the issue:

• A stateful toolbar: I've found there is a way to create custom toolbars in omm already (really cool!), I would strongly propose to initialize one for the user by default (one that contains all available tools, e.g. the standard, familiar "left-side vertical tool strip"), with the important addition that the current tool is statefully indicated on the toolbar (e.g. forced pressed state, or whichever way this can be economically implemented in Qt)
• Dynamic cursor representation: E.g. having custom cursors for each tool while interacting with the viewport (they need not be fancy, just recognizable, I can also offer to design some to help with this if you would like that)

I believe having these two would be another important stepping stone that helps users to feel more in power and less lost when trying out omm.