On Wed, 28 Sept 2022 at 10:00, Ray Andrews rayandrews@eastlink.ca wrote:
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!
Hmmmm, I see the paradigm as different, "menus" are selections from a set of commands, "dialogs" are small GUI windows for setting of values. Maybe you have the terminology wrong, see philosophical waffle at the end :-)
- 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.
There is no "General" menu item in Geany, do you mean the "General" tab in the preferences dialog, in which case you are using the wrong terminology and confusing things.
Menus are the "File" "Edit" "Search" etc along the top of the main window, and the menu item "Edit->Preferences" opens a dialog with a notebook with many pages. The dialog has vertical tabs "General" "Interface" etc which select groups of pages that address similarish settings, and the horizontal tabs select the pages in the group, eg "Startup" "Miscellaneous" in "General".
If the "Startup" and "Miscellaneous" pages were combined the resulting page would be tall enough that we are back in scrolling hell.
- 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.
Yes its not good for those of us with a poor short term, ummm, ahh, what do you call it, ahh memory!
- 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.
I think they are programmed on desktops with emulators, so as I said Geany isn't targeted at those platforms.
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.
- 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.
I'm not sure anything has changed, there is no good solution to fitting too much information on a finite sized screen, I remember years (ok decades) ago an emacs settings system that effectively was a specialist editor for config files, so it was an enormous categorised list (just like your request), and nothing was findable without prior knowledge. But it was an improvement on editing the config files as lisp text, it was harder to break the config formatting. But I remember desperately scrolling up and down looking for what I wanted. I never did get the hang of the Emacs paradigm.
- 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.
Yes, users need to learn their tool, at least until direct neural downloads are available.
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.
- 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.
I think you are still misusing the terminology. As I said at the start, "dialog"s are little windows for entering values, so other than editing raw config files, dialogs are the only way of entering values in a Graphical User Interface.
You have complained several times about levels of nesting, could it be that by "dialogs" you actually mean having hierarchical interactions compared to a flat user interface?
[start philosophy]
Humans are categorising animals, they have always used them, categories like "I can eat it", "it will eat me" were useful to cave men, and for societal arrangement, "big chief", "local chief", "family head", "wife", "family dog", "me" kept human disputes down as everybody knew their place. So our brains have become wired for managing hierarchies.
Of course thats a broad generalisation and everybody's ability to remember, understand and interact with hierarchies varies, but in general humans are good at it. So it makes a natural computer interface paradigm for the majority of people, and is not likely to change soon, notwithstanding you as an outlier.
[end philosophy]
Or to put it another way, as you admitted you are "pushing **it uphill with a fork", or "paddling a canoe upstream with a barbed wire paddle" and such similar memes.
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