[0.17] Customize the size of the shortcut bar

[raiguard]

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: The "item bar" is referred to as the quickbar, and the "toolbar" (cut/copy/paste) is the shortcut bar.

TL;DR

I would like to be able to customize the size of the shortcut bar, to fit better with various quickbar setups and screen sizes.

What ?

The shortcut bar is amazing. I've already made a mod that uses it, and have seen others who have utilized it to great extent. It was a fantastic idea. However, currently it is very limited in its customizability. For instance, you can only add up to twelvesixteen shortcuts.

I would like to be able to resize the shortcut bar window to add more columns or rows at will. Sorting would work the same as it does now, with subsequent items being placed below the preceding one until a column is filled. You could theoretically add as many shortcuts as you want, although most people probably wouldn't make it cover their entire screen.

Why ?

Personally, it's just an OCD thing. I would like to be able to have some shortcuts available, but don't want to make them visible because then this happens:

2019-03-12 12_39_55.png (97.85 KiB) Viewed 4812 times

As you can clearly see, it juts out above my quickbar and is really ugly. I only have one quickbar visible because I now use hotkeys to switch between them at will, and I found myself never using the second quickbar. However, the shortcut bar always takes up two vertical tiles, so it's very ugly.

I would like to be able to limit it to one tile tall, and extend it out beyond four tiles horizontally so I can make some use of all of my 4k real estate:

2019-03-12 12_48_31.png (463.14 KiB) Viewed 4812 times

Is this something that could be considered? Thanks in advance.

[Shakar]

The shortcut bar is able to hold up to 4 active shortcut bars at a time, you just need to enable the additional bars through the settings. Interface>Active Quickbars # will display up to 4 at most. I generally play with up to 4 shown at a time myself.

If you're talking about the bit to the right of the shortcut bar where the copy/paste and such would go, that appears to be expandable as well for mod use.

Edit
I see what you mean though, and think you're definately speaking of the right side of the bar. Yeah, would be nice to have it change size depending on the amount of options you have enabled actually.

[raiguard]

Bump. There is also another issue that is very annoying: when changing what mods you have enabled, the shortcut bar gets all screwed up. For example, I like to play on Redmew servers (mostly Diggy), which require a 100% vanilla client. I am also doing a singleplayer Space Exploration + AAI Industries run, which has around twenty mods installed. Every time I go back to playing Space Exploration from diggy, the shortcut bar is completely filled with mod-added shortcuts.

I can imagine two easy fixes: Either make shortcut bars individual per-save (similar to quickbars), or don't automatically enable mod-added shortcuts when a mod is re-enabled.

Thanks for your time!

[eradicator]

When they first introduced the shortcut bar i was really exited. It's great for vanilla and for modding. But it's definetly not as polished as the rest of the game yet. So i welcome any more customization options.

Personally the thing that annoys me most is that it violates the "the player should chose what goes where" paradigm that the new quickbar was meant to introduce, by not allowing me to order my shortcuts the way i want but instead have to use them in "random" order which mod authors can change at will.

On the modding side it's also super weird that a shortcut that is unlocked by research is always available in any game once it has been researched at least once - if i wanted that i wouldn't make it locked behind research.

Btw, your point can be made the other way around too. Shortcut bar should best always be the same height as the quickbar.

quickbartoosmall.png (66.33 KiB) Viewed 4730 times

[raiguard]

You actually can reorder the shortcuts. Open the shortcuts menu and you can drag the items on the list to the positions you want them in.

[eradicator]

You actually can reorder the shortcuts. Open the shortcuts menu and you can drag the items on the list to the positions you want them in.

I tried that in 0.17.0 and it didn't work, so i gave up. Now that you said that i tried again, and wow, it works only if one drags on the "drag marker" on the far right. And changing it in the list isn't really intuitive given the top-down-fill behavior of the actual bar, but hey it work. Pretty much what i'd count has "needs more polish" :D. Thanks for the tip though!