System Menu Deprecation

There’s a bug right now that makes collapsing near-useless (for some users, at least).

Gfy Mouse is slightly off. First I show that tabs work normally. Then I collapse them and try viewing them. They turn white but don't show the actual content of the tab. https://gfycat.com/SingleTinyCowrie

The ribbon does not properly show when clicking on a tab for the first time when collapsed. If I click on a tab, then click another right after, the second one will show. This issue persisted through a reinstall.

Edit: I’ve noticed that the bug will not occur if a web view is open. If a place file or script is open the ribbon bar will not show, but if a web view is open then it will.

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How long ago did you test this? It appears fixed for me in the latest version of vanilla Studio.

That gif/gfy was from less than 20 minutes ago. I took the gfy, then did a reinstall before posting. I still have the issue in the reinstall from < 20 minutes ago.

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To make users less antagonistic to this, release dark theme but for ribbon bar only as to convince many users of system menu to make the switch :wink:

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cri cri.

I like System Menu because everything is easily accessible; none of that tab stuff. The Quick Access bar is great and all, but it’s at the top of the screen and as Echo said, it doesn’t work for some options.

Dark theme and customizable UI or riot.

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Frankly I don’t believe System has been tested in a long while, as its paint bucket, dropper and material tools have been broken for ages.

Right now, the ribbon bar can’t do the following:

Pictured:

  • A menu bar (vital!)
  • Multiple rows of properly divided mouse-sized icons with no wasted space
  • A distinct lack of tabs, titles and other such nonsense
  • Widgets that respect Windows’ current theme

Not pictured: the reminder that the Ribbon is not suitable for IDEs (as demonstrated by its absense in Visual Studio).

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This is almost possible with the ribbon, but due to the UX issues I mentioned in my post it’s not viable. So close! But not close enough. Allowing ribbon tabs to drop down as menus might be a potential solution to the issue I mentioned though.

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While it’s not a new bug or anything, graying out and disabling 90% of the tool functionality in studio just because a script is open is a major annoyance.

If disabling menus isn’t going to be removed then merging the contextual Script Menu tab with the Test tab should be considered, disabling contextually irrelevant buttons within it. I find I need to use the Test tab far more than I need the Script Menu tab, and as a whole bouncing between the two menus is a pain.


Building workflow has (IMO) always been terrible with the ribbon bar. I’m forced to set a million key binds (which really destroy the fidelity of testing games in studio) or I have to click between 3 tabs and maintain and list of plugins along the quick access toolbar.

The Home tab is currently more useful for building than the Model tab. The Model tab lacks the terrain and insert tools that the Home tab has. It would be much more efficient for users to have both the Insert and Terrain tools available on the Model tab, and just removing the Terrain tab unless more tools and features are to come for it.

Being able to create our own ribbon tabs and fill them with whichever tool groups we want would resolve 99% of the workflow issues I (and I’m sure others) have. Even being able to insert user plugins into the existing tabs would go a long way to improving UX.


We can’t use the Alt key in studio, binding it for plugins and game binds gets overwritten by this Option to disable the double tapped alt keyboard shortcuts on ribbon bar. As a whole I think studio shortcuts should be ignored if the user is focused on the game window in any test mode with a client. Finally being able to crouch and walk forwards without closing studio would be a blessing.

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I always hated the RibbonBar… If they made it where you could customize the UI and whatnot, then it wouldn’t be so bad, but having to switch tabs between all the different tools I use is really irritating, and don’t say ‘quick access toolbar’, because as many have stated above, dropdowns don’t work with that.

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As someone who exclusively uses ribbon: The low information density looks good, but at the same time it is restrictive to power users. One way to fix that might be drag-n-drop customization.

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why you do this to me ?
just update it !!!

T-T

Excellent feedback everyone, we appreciate your candid responses. From your replies, here is what we want to address:

  • Fix all the bugs! Studio QA has been looking into the mouse offset bug. Please let us know if you come across any more!
  • Quick access interface. It looks like there is certainly room for improvement in configuring the quick access toolbar and we will investigate.
  • Custom tabs. While we have no immediate plans to address this, we understand that customizing the ribbon bar is important to you and we’ll be considering our options.
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I think potentially switching the order of QAM and the tabs may fix the UX issue with ribbons where you’re required to travel across your whole screen twice to enable and then use ribbon contents.

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I think a nice short-term solution would be allowing people to override the Ribbon Bar config with a Studio setting.

It’s always been possible to heavily customize it by editing RobloxStudioRibbon.xml, but because that’s in the same folder as Studio it has to be replaced every time Studio updates, and recently the launcher started replacing it with the default one if it’s different.

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Interesting, as the only layout I have used primarily is SystemMenu. Primarily meaning 98% of my account’s 9 years of using studio. This will be a hard transition for a lot of us.

I’m lucky I ventured out to mod the ribbon a while back. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to find out feedback gathering had started only after the interface was officially deprecated. IMO the feedback gathering should have done a lot earlier so the transition could have been “there’s no reason for you to use SystemMenu anymore” instead of “we don’t want you to use SystemMenu anymore”. Regardless, better late than never.

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Oh, another bug. RibbonBar turns the script editor cursor black on occasion and it’s really annoying when your script editor color is dark. This does not happen with SystemMenu, and the only fix is to re-open the script.

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How exactly do you get it to look like that? Now that system menu is broken and they obviously don’t intend on fixing it, I’m forced to use ribbonbar (and I’m not happy). That looks at least tolerable.

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I must say, that theme is fantastic.
Mind sending me the XML file for that?

P.S. If you want to stop Roblox Studio from overwriting files, just use my mod manager.

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That layout is seriously awesome, I would love to have an official format like that.