On 2022-09-27 15:07, Lex Trotman wrote:
Ray,
The problem with rants is they can be incoherent, I initially thought
you were talking about menus and commands, but now you seem to be just
talking about the preferences setting process.
I'm talking about the whole paradigm!
1. If it was a single preferences dialog with a list operating like
the keybinding dialog then it would be far bigger than even your giant
screen and need scrolling every time, on average half the list.
No, that would be going too far. There will be menus of course, but not
sub-sub-sub menus. As I mentioned, the General menu has no reason to
have two tabs within it, all that info could be on the one page.
2. Leaving the scroll where you last left it is useful when you change
the wrong thing and want to change it back, but otherwise its worse,
you have to know/guess/randomly pick which way to scroll to find
whatever else you want to change, up or down.
OK, but that's why backing up and restoring a config file should be a
piece of cake. In any event, having to remember a sequence of clicks
taking to you things you can't (yet) see but think you remember. If I
make a change to some biggish config screen -- not just Geany, but
anywhere -- the size of thing thing sorta gives me a 'geography' if you
know what I mean. But the clicking down an hierarchy is not the same,
it's an act of memory.
3. Scrolling with mice is (relatively) easy on desktops with large
screens, but its a [expletive deleted] pain on laptops with touchpads,
Granted! I admit my thinking is 100% desktop oriented. God knows how
you program on a cellphone anyway, but I'm old fashioned.
which also have smaller screens so need to scroll more, and a
surprising number of people use those for development. Luckily Geany
isn't likely to be used on tablets or phones where its all touch.
4. Other IDEs (Eclipse, vscode that I know of) do have a single
dialog, but to avoid scrolling hell they are arranged like directory
trees in file managers, the categories (and sub-categories where
applicable) are rolled up and the user only has to unroll the category
they need ... scroll to category, click expand, scroll through
category, "damn wrong one", scroll back up, click unexpand, scroll
categories, pick another and rinse and repeat. Its the worst of both
worlds.
Funny how 'progress' makes things worse.
5. To be fair the Eclipse/vscode method is better when the expert user
actually knows which category and sub category they want,
Yes. Yes. Yes. IF you know exactly what you are looking for that's
true, but if you are lost in the woods ... different story.
but until
then its a pain. But then that also applies to the tabbed dialog
Geany uses, its easy to navigate when you know where you want to go.
6. As Mike pointed out, Geany is not _specifically_ targeted at novice
users, expecting them to learn the UI layout over time is not
unreasonable, and it is organised in a way that makes sense ... to the
people who wrote it. And the people who contribute are the ones who
choose the target users, and they have chosen themselves.
So essentially there is no good solution, everybody has one they
prefer, but the only one that matters to Geany is the one somebody
contributes to the project.
Cheers
Grumpy olde guy
Lex
I'm glad to have you devs giving me some interaction on this. I'm a bit
of a prophet in the wilderness. But I've hated dialogue boxes since
Windows 4. Seems to me the universe has just gotten used to that
paradigm, but I never did.
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