[Github-comments] [geany/geany] Improve user experience when creating new projects (PR #3018)

Jiří Techet notifications at xxxxx
Sat Nov 27 16:32:56 UTC 2021


@xiota I'm not sure I'll have time to continue in this discussion which doesn't seem to lead anywhere and I'll leave space for discussion for others. Ultimately it won't be up to you or me if this pull request gets merged and our opinions are known now - it would be nice to get feedback from others too so I'd encourage everyone to try and decide for himself.

A few random notes:

> Still confusing for users who (are completely new to projects and) don't know the purpose of selecting the folder.
Most people do not stay new users forever. Experienced users should be allowed to streamline their workflow. This PR prevents that.

I think I'm an experienced user of Geany and the current experience of opening projects is terrible. @dolik-rce agrees, the guys in #2245 agree, other guys I talked with in person agree. I respect your opinion but if it's just a matter of doing things in a different order, you'll just have to get used to a slightly different workflow but nothing will be dropped.

> Currently, users can change the fields in any order they want. It is your personal preference to start with folder first. Other users should not be forced to conform to your personal preference.

It's not a personal preference - it's a necessity if you want to set the other 2 values correctly. But again, this is how other editors work and what people in #2245 suggested - open project as if it were a directory. And newcomers will be used to that much more than the tedious project creation Geany has now - in every editor you just have to specify in which directory your project is.

> That is not all this PR does. It also breaks any workflow that does not conform to your personal preference of filling in the folder first. It adds extra steps for anyone who doesn't want to use your preferred defaults.

It doesn't. If you press cancel in the first dialog or select a whatever directory, you can customize everything in the second dialog. But I think once you get used to it, I'll actually be happy when everything is pre-filled for you.

> (I) Change the base path last. Sometimes I leave it alone and change it from Project Preferences later because the project folder may not yet exist at the time of project creation. For instance, I may not have cloned from git yet.

It's just a matter of doing things in a different order - if you don't have a folder with a project, you don't need the Geany project and its creation can wait until the moment you have your sources. When you know project opening works this way, you'll just create the folder first. But again, as stated before, you still have your option to customize everything in the second dialog. Other editors won't allow you to create a project without having a directory for sources and I doubt anyone has ever complained about that.

> What (technically) prevents this PR from being implemented as a plugin?

Geany API doesn't contain a function to open project and I don't think this function should be added. I definitely won't create a plugin just for this.

To be clear about some things:
1. Open project properties in the last step is just a convenience thing I added but I don't find essential and can be dropped if disliked by others.
2. If desired, I could leave "Project->New.." as it behaves now and add "Project->New from folder..." with this new behavior.

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