Pro Tip: Organize your tabs your way.

If you’re like me, there is a lot of functionality that you add to blender by using add-ons, but that brings  problems, one is cause because of blender’s poor tabs design: have a few add-ons and the tabs gets squished so you can barely read them, mostly when working in laptops with not perfect resolution, on top of that I think blender’s dpi setting is to low and at some point it will hurt my eyes so I push it from 72 dpi to 85, which makes tabs have even less space.

Back to topic, the second thing is that many developers are messy and they want to have a whole tab for their little one button script while their script should probably live in an existing tab like an add-on i recently showed you called “dynamic parent” that creates it’s own tab, when it could just live in the animation tab or the relationship tab, and that is just wrong.

Well at the end of the day everything in blender is customizable or seems to be but, and this is a big but, has to be done via python so for most of us is useless.

So I’ll help you guys figure out something pretty basic to be able to reorder your tabs.

First pick the addon that you’re to modify it’s position:

then right click select on any of it’s buttons and select “Edit Source”

So now open up a new “text editor”

Down below in the text datablock you’ll find the .py corresponding to that addon:

next open your tools panel (in this case T doesn’t work, because it’ll start writing… text editor duh!)

You’ll see to your left the FIND panel also turn on line numbers and sintax hightlight that will make it easier on the eyes.

So in the Find panel what you want to write is “bl_category” (without quotation marks) and inyou’ll get this

So the bl_category is the name of the tab where the add-on will sit, if the one named does not exist, blender will just create one for it.

So let’s say you want to put it in the animation panel instead:

In some cases doing this and just hitting “run script”  will make it work

Before running the script

After running the script

Cool huh?, YES… so now you need to save the file, and then save your settings.

If you want to share your modifications, save it as a .py file and share it with the world!

Happy blending!