Here you can see the new toolbar vs the old one. Here’s a sneak peek of what we are working on: We are building something that can work in a consistent way in all of Blender’s modes, and we will have a toolbar that is both slimmer, while being more communicative. We’ve landed on a design which doesn’t disrupt Blender’s beloved hotkey-oriented workflow, while still allowing the use of widgets for many tools. We want to make sure that the UI chrome always defers to the user-created content, and doesn’t take up unnecessary room. The old toolbar used up a lot of screen space.These have been working in various different ways that were incompatible with one another, and we would like to unify and streamline the way these kinds of tools work. We also have been lacking consistency in how we tackle the kinds of tools that users want to stay active, such as Grease Pencil tools, Sculpt tools, Paint tools and so on.It basically doesn’t work, because it immediately starts interpreting your cursor movement as input, and so you can’t move objects to the left. In Blender 2.79 and earlier, try and hit the Translate button in the toolbar to move your object. As many people have no doubt experienced, our old toolbar never really worked well.

Very important: We are committed to keeping Blender’s efficient keyboard-focused workflow.

Using tools should be slick, gratifying and pleasant.

We want to sweat the details, and set a higher bar for the fit and finish of the tools interface.

We want to make it possible to use Blender in a more visual way, not just via shortcuts.

We want to allow for manipulator widgets for many more tools – not just for Move, Rotate, Scale.

We want more consistency across the various Blender modes.

We set out with a few goals that we wanted to achieve for the tools & widgets: I thought it would be a good idea to tell you why, and what our plans are. As many of you might already have seen in the daily builds of Blender 2.8, we have been working on a new toolbar and widget system for Blender.

Blender 2.79 manual