Material: Order of Appearance properties in the editor

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Problem description

Feature request: Priority: low

Currently the order of appearance properties in the material editor is different than in the properties dialog.

Properties:

Material editor (alphabetic order):

This is not consistent and can easily lead to user switching to muscle memory and changing the property according to the order (e.g. the second property), which leads to incorrect results.

Proposed solution: Change the order the appearance properties are displayed in the Material editor to the same as in properties dialog:

• Diffuse Color
• Ambient Color
• Specular Color
• Emissive Color
• Shininess
• Transparency

This has several advantages

1. The muscle memory stated above.
2. It is likely many FreeCAD will not understand the basic concepts of CG color. Placing diffuse color on the first place is the best solution as this is the most important to change the resulting appearance of the object.
3. This order is more common and can be seen in other VFX software packages such as Blender or 3DS Max.
4. It brings more consistency across FreeCAD UI

Full version info

OS: Windows 10 build 19045
Architecture: x86_64
Version: 1.1.0dev.14555 (Git shallow)
Build date: 2025/08/12 22:08:35
Build type: Release
Branch: main
Hash: 4195f7fee28e65b289b9390ff7a0deab49e81040
Python 3.11.13, Qt 6.8.3, Coin 4.0.3, Vtk 9.3.1, boost 1_86, Eigen3 3.4.0, PySide 6.8.3
shiboken 6.8.3, xerces-c 3.3.0, IfcOpenShell 0.8.0, OCC 7.8.1
Locale: English/United States (en_US)
Navigation Style/Orbit Style/Rotation Mode: Revit/Turntable/Drag at cursor
Stylesheet/Theme/QtStyle: FreeCAD.qss/FreeCAD Light/
Logical DPI/Physical DPI/Pixel Ratio: 96/126.557/1.25
Installed mods: 
  * Reporting
  * Telemetry 1.0.2

Subproject(s) affected?

Material

Anything else?

No response

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