Hey there, Ray Andrews wrote: Perhaps, but the way I see it, each program is the brainchild of its developer or developers and is structured in one of these ways or a mixture of any or all of them: * however it happens to come together as features are added * however the developer(s) think it ought to be * however the developer(s) believe others would want it to be * however others have expressed wishes for it to be It's also often tough to decide where certain features ought to be kept and whether there should be repetition. For instance, some features are buried inside of an editing interface, but are also available via a checkbox on a drop-down menu in the main window. Depending on how many features a program has, it might not be possible to have them all offered as checkboxes on the main menu, so decisions often have to be made as to which are most commonly-used, etc., when determining which ones should be there. Geany's got a lot of power and it's all got to go somewhere. You're in luck. Geany has such a text file. On my system (Kubuntu 22.04 LTS), it's the hidden ~/.config/geany/geany.conf file. You may find it elsewhere depending on the operating system it's installed on. I've only ever run Geany on Ubuntu MATE and Kubuntu and that file has always been in the same place. -- Little Girl There is no spoon.

1. It probably wouldn't fit on computers with small screens, all told Geany has a lot of UI when you include data entrys which is what dialogs are for 2. its not supported by the GUI toolkit 3, as you say, its unfamiliar to users, making switching applications more difficult, very few people use only one app Editing this by hand is a bit tricky, Geany only reads it on startup, but Geany will write it on close, overwriting any edits, so you need to have Geany closed while editing it, so you need a different editor. Probably best not to hand edit it. Cheers Lex

On 2022-09-27 06:51, Ray Andrews wrote: I wasn't sure what you were getting at for a while, but it is becoming clearer to me. Believe the thinking from the old days is that scrolling is to be avoided when it can be. 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. Additionally there is the "spatial" idea from the original Macintosh OS, think System 6 and 7, etc. That is, you learn your way around the filesystem directionally, each folder has a window and you can size and move it to a position and it remembers, so you can find your way back like rooms in a building, like consulting a map. In geany prefs terms, this would be go down three "floors" and make a right at the hallway and go to the end. You'll remember better over time. This stuff has gone out of style somewhat because we have 10x things to look at in modern workstations vs the mid-80s. So searchable lists are used more often. But the original models are still useful when there's not too many items or organize. 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.) ... 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. This would be a lot cheaper than substantially reorganizing the prefs window. -Mike

On 2022-09-27 11:40, Ray Andrews wrote: Unfortunately, scrolling is definitely harder for newbies to desktop computers. Panels are hidden either way. While geany is not solely for beginners it is used by a lot of them learning how to program for the first or second time. Not a complete win. This is more true these days when the current fashion is to hide, obfuscate, and eradicate scrollbars at every possible opportunity. Drives me crazy because I finally have giant hi-res monitors on my workstation with plenty of room for scroll bars and tablet people are doing everything possible to get rid of them, even taking away the option. On the other hand, scroll wheels and gestures have made it easier to do. But we need indication that scrolling is even possible, which is often harder these days due to dictates of fashion. AKA "lack of affordances" -Mike

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. 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. 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. 3. Scrolling with mice is (relatively) easy on desktops with large screens, but its a [expletive deleted] pain on laptops with touchpads, 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. 5. To be fair the Eclipse/vscode method is better when the expert user actually knows which category and sub category they want, 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

On Wed, 28 Sept 2022 at 10:00, Ray Andrews <rayandrews(a)eastlink.ca> wrote: 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 :-) 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. Yes its not good for those of us with a poor short term, ummm, ahh, what do you call it, ahh memory! I think they are programmed on desktops with emulators, so as I said Geany isn't targeted at those platforms. 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. Yes, users need to learn their tool, at least until direct neural downloads are available. 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.

On 2022-09-27 15:07, Lex Trotman wrote: I'd tweak this statement to say there is no perfect solution. But several decent ones, and Geany is already pretty-darn good. BTW, did you see this? 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. Would it be possible to add that? Good for consistency, I think. -Mike