Buttons bunched at bottom. They are in groups, but the grouping is not apparent at all. Yeah, looks like an uncoordinated cluster.
Hard to remember because they don't have a label, hmm, are you sure? Which of the icons are obstuse? Do you really suggest 30 words instead of 30 icons? If words plus icons on all 30 buttons, how to align?
Do you want to hide most of the buttons? These buttons aren't context-sensitive. The mirror button is there, and does nothing, when the tile selection is empty. That's bad, but buttons rolling in and out is also disorienting. This dovetails into a fundamental design choice:
Lack of context menu is good and bad. Right mouse button (RMB) doesn't access a context menu. Reason: Everything that would go into such a context menu instead gets a hotkeyed button. If you want speed, learn the hotkey, or even remap (some default bindings suck).
Lack of context menu costs discoverability and is hard to justify; it's geared towards the stronger users. Context menus are far slower than hotkeys. Context menus are only slightly faster than buttons at the side because they're local (no need to move mouse by large distance) but their buttons/entries roll in and out.
Pie menus instead?
Instead of accessing a context menu, holding RMB scrolls. This, again, is the fastest and most precise way to scroll, far preferable to edge scrolling and, on small-to-medium maps, obsoleting minimap scrolling. The scrolling on RMB is extremely convenient and is the biggest argument against pie menus. Still, everybody and their cat understand that RMB opens context menus.
Disorienting because no border is shown. Yes, excellent criticism. The default zoom leaves you floating in the void. I'm planning the most straightforward fix for now, to always show more of the map when the editor starts.
Lack of new-map dialog is a feature. My goal is to remove dialog boxes wherever possible. Why do you want a dialog at start of map? You select the tileset when you insert the first tile. You select the map size once you're unhappy with the one-screen default.
Map dialog sucks. It's true and I would love to ditch this dialog. User should be able to drag the edges of the map, or at least click on the edges to do something with them.
No number entry widget. I rolled the UI toolkit myself and it doesn't have a number widget that has both up/down buttons and allows for entry of a number. You want direct number entry for the map dialog and the skills dialog. The map dialog should be abolished entirely, but the skills dialog should ideally get direct number entry, yes.
Background. Lack of background images is a feature. I'd love to cut even the background color. Haven't decided yet. Maybe introduce a gradient instead of one solid color. The background color is OK if it's subtle and dark. Backgrounds with more structure risk being mistaken for foreground; levels should be decorated with terrain instead.
Sonic sound test digit things are the standard presentation for colors, decimal digits would be weird. If the background is settable in a dialog, it should preview immediately when a value changes. Then the exact representation (hex or decimal) isn't even important.
This covers 1/3 of the rant and I'm happy to discuss this part in more detail.
Dullstar, have you gotten into UX professionally? Would love very much to see the more detailed rant on bad editor UIs.
The negative transfer from NL, yes, it exists, but I believe this belongs purely on NL's plate. For a long time, it forced its egregious unremappable hotkey layout on every NL user; it was impossible to rest the non-mouse hand in any place for long. Even offering such an archaic layout in Lix feels like a regression. If one is used to old NL keys and doesn't wish to improve, one is certainly free to remap even though it pains to see livestreams with mappins spread across the entire keyboard.
-- Simon