Hi Martin, just to explain a bit further, you asked previously:

> So working from a fully minimised tool menu, I think what I was hoping for was an option that
> allows the menu to open when moused over without clicking (heading text turns blue), and
> closes on its own when left.

So imagine that it was set up this way where all the titles stayed collapsed all the time and popped up menus on top of everything when you just moved the mouse over them.

Now imagine with it set up that way that you started with the mouse at the top of the screen and wanted to use one of the "Edit" tools which are on the second row.

In order to get to that second row your mouse will first need to pass over the first row with "Draw curve / Draw solid" on it. But uh-oh when your mouse moved over that first row the draw buttons popped up and if you continued to move your mouse downward instead of going onto the second row of titles you would instead be over the popped up draw tools which are now covering up the rest of the titles below them.

You'd have to do something like try to "sneak up" on the titles maybe coming in from the side of the UI rather than being able to just move your mouse in a straight line to the particular controls you want to get at.

This kind of problem is one of the reasons why it's an intentional feature for the palettes to actually push down other content below them when their tools are opened and not to just pop the tools up as a floating menu covering things up...

So it would take a major restructuring of the UI to have things pop open just with a mouse over, instead of having tools arranged in a vertical stack the top level launchers would probably need to be arranged horizontally so that when one of them activated it could pop up the menu below all of the title things instead of covering them up, basically working more like a more tranditional pull-down menu. But that's a totally different UI than MoI's UI, not just a small tweak or option. Also in a primarily "horziontal band" type UI like that it's quite difficult to utilize space for a command options area very well, one of the best things about Moi's side pane UI is that it works very well to have the top area of the side pane as a reserved area for showing the options and controls for the current command. Those kinds of options like check boxes are easier to set up in a space that's more similar to the shape of a dialog box.

So there are a lot of different pieces of the UI that work together in the current design - the side pane allows for a nice command options area at the top, so that makes a lot of space available below it to house the "main menu" of all the various controls which means different categories of controls will be stacked vertically and vertically stacked things don't work well with the kind of system that you're asking about with stuff popping up just on mouse overs...

There are a lot of details and considerations like this that have gone into the current UI design, the current system is a result of about 1 year's worth of design effort at the very initial start of MoI about 8 years ago or so. It's such a fundamental part of MoI that it's not something that's easy to just switch to a different system.

- Michael