QOL.. Quality Of Life tools for Blender! 

Materials Panel

The Materials Panel is an elegant complement to Blenders standard materials features, adding an overview of all available materials and a range of user-friendly utilities.  The QOL range of tools are designed to be intuitive and unobtrusive. To give you access to "every day useage" features in a minimal footprint. The Materials Panel is (to date) the largest of the QOL tools, with a comprehensive range of tools, but in an elegant fashion.

Updates!
    Version 1.1.7 now includes:
• "Used in selection" indicator.  The "hand" button has a different appearance now, displayed as a hollow or filled circle. This shows an immediate indication of which materials the current object(s) are using!  While visually acting as a usage indicator, it still performs the same function of selecting all objects with the material.
• Duplicate material.  CTRL-Clicking the shaderball of any material makes an instant duplicate for adding variations.
• Filter.  Scenes populated by great numbers of materials no longer require looking for the material in question.

Features:

Flexibility:   The Panel can either be displayed as an NPanel, or properties panel via the addon preferences.  Your choice!

Apply: one-click application of material to selections with the choice of whether to overwrite or preserve existing.

Grab: Directly select all objects in your scene using a material. If the selection contains multiuple materials it automatically sets the active slot of the object(s) to the appropriate material.

New Material: Generates a new material on the object, and also gives it an initial CSS3 compliant color. All Gamma and color correct. As a bonus it also names the new material appropriately (how useful is "material.037" ?)

Direct color editing: So much easier to coordinate and match colors on multiple materials when they're all directly present and editable.

Cleanup: Removes unused material slot data.  Does your object have 15 materials on it, but only actually using one or two ?  Cleanup! and the others are wiped off.

Purge unused:  Universally travels the scene and removes reduntant materials that are cluttering things. 

Protect/Fake user:  Directly see and edit the protected status of materials. Useful if, for example, you want to purge unused, but retain x.

Discount:

Note that this addon is also available as part of the discounted QOL Tools: Full Collection package!
qol-tools-full-collection