Navigation Screen: Always show appender

[jasmussen]

What problem does this address?

The default menu on the navigation screen doesn't show the appender:

Not until the menu is selected:

This is the default behavior for inner-blocks, and the the navigation, even on this screen, is technically a block.

What is your proposed solution?

Extracting from #31228 (comment), maybe that plus should show up by default, even without the navigation block being selected first.

[jasmussen]

CC: @javierarce in case you have any thoughts on a better approach!

[javierarce]

I think there's an indirect and less "invasive" way to solve this issue. If we fixed the hover state of the menu highlighting its border as I mentioned here, users would naturally understand that the menu is clickable.

That said, I think your solution could work, and it's probably more accessible (although from a purely aesthetic perspective and to maintain the default behaviour, I wouldn't show an item that's not part of the menu).

[paaljoachim]

This is what I see with Gutenberg 10.5.3 activated.

EDIT:
I left the screen and came back again. This time no block inserter was seen by default.

Having the + icon button appender shows that the area can be interacted with. It is like a call for action to the user.
I do believe it will be helpful to have it on by default.

[spacedmonkey]

Maybe the best solution to this problem, is to add the block inserter to navigation screen? This would keep the navigation screen inline other block editors.

Post editor

Widget editor

Navigation editor

[talldan]

This has become more important since #34568 was merged.

Before that the navigation editor showed the FSE-style placeholder preview for an empty unselected navigation block:

That was undesired, but what happens now is there's just an empty block:

Fixing this does mean fighting with a lot of the block appender visibility logic. It has both code and styles for hiding the appender, most of which need to be revisited.