Try showing move controls only for the selected block.

[kjellr]

Followup from #17216. This PR experiments with showing the movers only for the selected block. This mirrors how this works on mobile (where there is no hover 🙂), and would close out issues like #16681 and #11725.

I'm initially showing these all the time when the block is selected, but we can switch back to having them appear only when the left side of the block is hovered, if we'd prefer that.

[shaunandrews]

I absolutely love this.

[mapk]

This works well for solving the few related issues. It definitely highlights the difficulty of moving the Separator block which is already a known problem because now I need to click the block before moving it.

I don't mind the interaction at all. In fact, I'd say it causes me to focus on my actions much more purposefully which is a good thing.

I really like how you have the movers aligning with the block b/c they appear to be centered on the content when it's only one line.

One little issue which isn't a blocker is how this overlaps the sibling inserter icon +. It's a bit funky and probably only related to the Separator block which is difficult anyways. So don't even worry about it.

[jasmussen]

Thanks for exploring this, I'll test this in a bit.

I want to note that if we merge this and decide we love it, there's some CSS refactoring we can do to the block structure itself. Right now there are some positive and negative paddings left and right of the blocks, which is there in part to ensure space left and right of the blocks, but also in part to make it so that hovering the block actually works. This can probably be simplified in an on-select only situation.

[ZebulanStanphill]

I like this change.

As for the issue of the mover overlapping the appender button, I think that's really a fault of the appender button design. I think the appender really needs a redesign to fix all the various overlapping UI issues. See #13571.

[kjellr]

Cool, thanks folks. Before merge, I'd love to get one more code review just to make sure I did this correctly and didn't rip out anything important by mistake. 😄

[youknowriad]

This hook is not used anymore, right? Can we remove it?

[kjellr]

You're right, good call! Removed in 40fbc51

[chrisvanpatten]

I do think this should be merged, but would offer the personal caveat that I really like having movers available whether the block is selected or not (and I think I've advocated as such in the past). I think in a writing context, this workflow makes more sense but when you get into more "visual" page designs (for example, I'm working on building a custom gallery post type where each block represents a slide in the gallery) having the movers always-visible is much more useful.

That said, I think it's clear I'm in the minority; plus the idea of being able to refactor the block chrome CSS to be simpler in some circumstances (per @jasmussen's comment) would outweigh my own personal feelings on this one :)

[ZebulanStanphill]

@chrisvanpatten I feel somewhat similar. If asked a year ago, I probably would have been against this PR since I like being able to move blocks without having to select them. But as I've had to deal with nested blocks more and more, the movers have become more and more distracting/annoying.

I now prefer the behavior in this PR. I think the positives outweigh the negatives in this case.

[kjellr]

👋 We all seem to be mostly in agreement around this change, and the dev issues appear to be fixed. I'm going to go ahead and merge. Thanks folks!

[draganescu]

Hi @kjellr did this close #16681 ?

[kjellr]

@draganescu, yes! Thanks for the reminder. I'll close that one.