On Fri, 2009 Jan 16 17:04:36 +0000, Nick Treleaven wrote:
I did it like that because the Gnome HIG says the most commonly-used button should be on the right, and I assumed it was the document button. Then it seemed logical to put the session button near the document button.
But don't forget, the buttons appear only after you click the "Replace All" arrow, at the left edge of the dialog. Consider the distance that you need to move the mouse afterward to reach each button---shouldn't the more common case(s) require a shorter distance?
I see where you're coming from on the Gnome HIG, and that is a reasonable approach. But the "Replace All" arrow confounds the logic of that, IMO. If the most commonly used button is to be on the right, then I would suggest removing the arrow, and keeping that section of the dialog always visible, so that there is no need for the pointer to visit the left edge. (This would also make the dialog require one less click, and score UI brownie points by removing a modal element.)
Anyway, the selection button can also be used often, so we could change the order to:
[Session] [Document] [Selection]
This also makes sense in making the function with the biggest impact away from the commonly used position.
Aye, as well as having them in a sorted order. And for my part, replace-in-selection is a much more common operation than replace-in-document. When I'm editing a large source file, the latter tends to be a big/scary/rare deal; more typically I'll, say, rename a variable in a function with the former.
--Daniel