On 2022-09-27 09:51, Mike Miller wrote:
Believe the thinking from the old days is that scrolling is to be avoided when it can be.
There may have been an age where that made sense, but I think it's long gone.
I generally agree, so we might split the pane into notebook tabs when they get too cluttered. When there are a few tab panes it is fine of course, but keybindings would have so many we there'd be two dozen tabs! That changes the balance to prefer a scrolling list, in that case.
IMHO the keybindings situation is to be preferred. I'd much rather do some scrolling than some blind hopping up and down a menu tree. Again using keybindings as an example, if I'm not quite sure which sub section might be the right one, it hardly matters, a bit of scrolling and I find what I'm looking for. There is no question that I'm on the right page. But if it were broken up into sub-pages, I'd have to go clicking around, and probably click on the same sub-page half a dozen times because one forgets where one has visited.
As you can see, this stuff is an art as well as science. So, not sure I fully agree, but yes both ways may be useful in certain circumstances. (I personally prefer 90s-era-style UI's, though not their artwork, haha.)
It's an art alright. Elegant organization is a skill not learned in books or via googling or by asking what's her name, Alexi or whatever.
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Getting back to the original issue, which I think can be fixed easily. Almost every other top-level widget in geany has a menu-item toggle in the View menu. But the Status Bar is conspicuously absent for no particular reason? Add it and the long journey thru the prefs would be avoided in the first place.
Good idea.
This would be a lot cheaper than substantially reorganizing the prefs window.
-Mike
I appreciate your thoughts Mike. I know I'm railing against long standing traditions but I'm quite sure I'm right. Scrolling is better than clicking! Avoid sub pages when ever possible. Only when some very clear, crisp organizational issue makes it advisable.