Add Ability to Hide UXP Panels from the Plugins Menu

Photoshop UXP Plugin API
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1

For UXP Plugins that have lots of subpanels, (e.g. main, settings, about, loading dialogs, etc) it doesn’t always make sense to have them all listed in the Plugin menu since they often don’t make sense by themselves or it can make your plugin feel cluttered for the user, not knowing which item to hide or show.

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It would be great to have the ability, like we had with CEP panels, to be able to hide certain panels from the Plugin menu so we can more easily direct the user to the panel they “should” be interacting with, and hide the ones that only should be shown in certain situations.

It was once suggested to add this line to a manifest in order to hide a panel from the menu or plugins panel:

  "hostUIContext": {
    "hideFromMenu": true,
    "hideFromPluginsPanel": true
  },

But this doesn’t appear to work, at least not for 3rd party UXP panels, however some functionality like this would make a lot of sense in the manifest. Thanks!

2

Justin your observations are very interesting, I hope that someone on the team will take these reflections into consideration.

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3

IMO you should re-think what you use as a panel and what as a dialog/popup. Based on the names, I can only assume, you don’t actually want to have “Loading” or “About” as actual panels, but rather as dialogs, which you show only programatically when user clciks something.

My point is, that based on the info you provided, it’s not the UXP problem, but rather architecture of your plugin

4

Fair point, my examples perhaps weren’t the best to illustrate this issue.

Here’s another example:

A panel that can have anywhere from 1 to 10 different user-customizable toolbars, but you only want the main one to show up in the menu because only 1 may be in use and 9-10 may be empty or 1-5 are in use but 6-10 are empty. In this case you’d be better off managing opening and closing these panels from the main panel than always having to display all of them in the menus regardless.

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5

I might need something like this in few months as well.

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6

OK, I get your point now. Where did you find this hostUIContext config? Is it documented?

7

It was suggested in the Adobe Devs Slack, but the history is gone. Regardless it doesn’t work for 3rd party UXP panels.

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