"Always Open Block Settings/Styles" Block Editor Preference for Sidebar Panels

[jhmonroe]

What problem does this address?

Advanced FSE/Block Editor users find it tedious that the right sidebar individual Block Settings/Styles Carrot/3-Dot Sub-Panels are always closed by default.
Examples:
Settings > Position, Advanced, Etc
Styles > Typography (and all subsections), Dimensions, Etc

To open them all you need to perform multiple actions one by one.

Imagine you need to do something repetitive like add an Advanced class for a bunch of blocks.
Every time you click on a different block, Advanced is collapsed for that block. You have to first click to open that carrot.
Same for every time you want to change a font, size, or line height. You have to open all those via click>dropdown>select one by one. It can be maddening and a huge waste of time! :-)

History: I seem to remember in earlier versions of the block editor interface, these panels were all in one tab and all open but people changed the default because it looked cluttered for people just starting with Wordpress.

What is your proposed solution?

Similar to "Always Open List View," we should have a Preference to have all collapsed sidebar areas open by default if the user chooses.
"Always Open Block Settings/Styles"

Related Issues?

It's suprising how little discussion I've found (in open issues) about this—I searched all over this repository to find discussion of this annoyance and only found the Related Issues & Discussions below.

Editor preferences are saved in database every time the Settings sidebar opens/closes #61384
#61384

Dimension Tools and Controls #28356
#28356

Related Discussion

Matt Mullenweg noticed this speedbump today in realtime during Jamie WP's speed build challenge as well!

It is discussed here as a workaround (that does not work as well as proposed solution below would): https://snipsnip.pro/s/751

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/block-styles-settings-interface/

Someone else wanting option to swap order of Settings/Styles: #50205

Screenshots:

[snehapatil2001]

Hi @jhmonroe,

I’ve been reviewing this issue and tried to reproduce it on my local environment, but I haven’t been able to replicate the behavior. Specifically:

After expanding the Advanced dropdown for a block (e.g., Paragraph), switching to another block (e.g., Heading) does not collapse the Advanced dropdown; it remains open as expected.
I’ve tested this with different block types and configurations, but the dropdown behavior stays consistent.

Here are the details of my environment:

• WordPress Version: 6.8-alpha-59366
• Gutenberg Version: 19.8.0
• Theme: Twenty Twenty-Five
• Browser: Chrome 131.0.6778.109 (Official Build) (arm64)

Could you share additional details to help reproduce the issue?

[jhmonroe]

Hi @snehapatil2001 that wasn't exactly the enhancement I was describing. What you're describing is the behavior of the database remembering how a user left the panels open/closed. That does behave as expected and was discussed in the tickets I mentioned above (#61384)

I was describing a feature request for an available preference under 3dot>preferences>General that allows someone to always have them all open the same way "Always Open List View" is a preference

Here's another discussion of this I just found today #55994: #55994