[Geany] Minor usability issues

[John Gabriele]

On Feb 8, 2008 8:19 AM, Harold Aling <h.aling at home.nl> wrote:
>
> Dear Geany devs,
>
> I've got some little issues/requests:
> * Closing tab 3 focuses tab 2 instead of the new third tab.
>
> tab1 tab2 [tab3] tab4
>
> *close tab 3*
>
> tab1 [tab2] tab4
>
> Firefox (and other apps) all focus the new third tab
> tab1 tab2 [tab4]
>

Another usability issue with the tabs, IMO, is that clicking those
little arrows on either side of the tabs move you between docs instead
of just scrolling the view of the tabs (like it does with Firefox).
I'm not sure I see the use case for the current button behaviour. If
the user knows they want to move one document to the right, and they
really don't want to hit Ctrl-PgDn, instead of going for that tiny tab
button on the side, they *could* just hover the mouse over the tabs
and scroll the wheel a little bit. If they want to go back, scrolling
the opposite direction is easier than moving the mouse all the way
over to the other side and finding the other small button.

Users with many docs open, who use the tabs along with the mouse for
document navigation, probably also drag-and-drop the tabs around to
group them. Having the buttons on the sides scroll the tab view would
then enable users to easily slide from viewing one group of tabs to
another, or to adjust the view so they can see particular groups that
they know they'll be bouncing to and from.

Incidentally, on my system there's an irregular and minor bug with
those arrows that I don't think is new: clicking them sometimes moves
you two tabs over instead of just one. I think it's come up on this
list before, and it's probably not important for users who just use
Ctrl-{PgUp,PgDn} anyway (which always works correctly for me). Might
be interesting to see if the anomaly goes away if the tab button
behaviour were changed as described above...

I'm running Geany on Ubuntu with:

INFO: Geany 0.14, GTK+ 2.12.0, GLib 2.14.1

---John