Bugzilla – Full Text Bug Listing
| Summary: | [ViewMgmt] Can't read view titles | ||||||||||
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| Product: | [Eclipse Project] Platform | Reporter: | Jerome Lanneluc <jerome_lanneluc> | ||||||||
| Component: | UI | Assignee: | Platform UI Triaged <platform-ui-triaged> | ||||||||
| Status: | CLOSED WONTFIX | QA Contact: | |||||||||
| Severity: | major | ||||||||||
| Priority: | P5 | CC: | douglas.pollock, eclipse, Kevin_McGuire, michaelvanmeekeren, n.a.edgar | ||||||||
| Version: | 3.1 | Keywords: | helpwanted | ||||||||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||||||||||
| Hardware: | PC | ||||||||||
| OS: | Windows XP | ||||||||||
| Whiteboard: | stalebug | ||||||||||
| Bug Depends on: | 119890 | ||||||||||
| Bug Blocks: | |||||||||||
| Attachments: |
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Description
Jerome Lanneluc
Created attachment 33777 [details]
3.1 way of showing stacked views
Created attachment 33778 [details]
3.2 way of showing stacked views
I feel we should favour displaying the icon, even on inactive tabs. I also feel the ellipsis is extraneous; the text could just be truncated abruptly. But I'm still fond of displaying all of the tabs if at all possible. Removing the ellipsis is not sufficient. It will just push the problem further. If you persist in showing all views, you will end up making them unrecognizable. Adding an icon would make the problem even worse as most of the time I cannot identify a view with an icon but with its full title. Why was this changed in the first place ? The 3.1 way was good as it would show the most used views, and allowed me to quicckly jump to other views using the drop down menu. See bug 119890 for reasons for this change. (In reply to comment #5) > See bug 119890 for reasons for this change. Thanks for the link Boris. I hacked my exported preferences to add the 2 following lines: /instance/org.eclipse.ui/EDITOR_MINIMUM_CHARACTERS=10000 /instance/org.eclipse.ui/VIEW_MINIMUM_CHARACTERS=10000 then I reimported my preferences, exited and restarted Eclipse, and I'm now back to usable staked views and editors. So I guess this bug could become a request to add a preference UI for these 2 options. *** Bug 129010 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** Not sure if marking as a dupe would be the right thing. MVM, if/when you have a chance, we should talk about this. I agree with Doug, instead of the "..." repeated 5 times, this space could go towards making a more readable name. Whatever we do will be a tradeoff between space and text at this point so we should try to do our best here. The designer that works with LWP once pointed out to me that there were numerous usability studies on this issue. The concensus in the end was that simply clipping the text was more effective than using ellipses or other kinds of truncation (e.g. omitting vowels). I believe they went with this approach in the LWP presentation. what's the status of this item, still planned for 3.2? If for 3.2 or later is up to you, but I agree with what Jerome says in comment 6. Please expose a preference to control that. If I have 10 or more views stacked in the same group, the only way of telling them apart is by reading the *full* name. Icons might help in some cases, but the positioning of tabs does not (as the order - or whether - I end up opening them depends on the workflow). The current compression seems to be the best compromise in the case where there is no preference. This item will be reveiwed in 3.3 (see bug 119890 as well). I'll attach a picture which shows that in 3.1 it was often the case that many views tabs were not visible and were in the chevron while in 3.2 you can read enough of the titles to be able to select without having to spend mouse clicks opening the dropdown. Created attachment 37932 [details]
4 versions of view tab behaviour
As of 3.3, we are showing the view icons all the time wich should help recognizing them even in situations with restricted horizontal space. Reopening since showing icons is not satisfactory as said in comment 4. What is really needed is a UI to change the preferences: /instance/org.eclipse.ui/EDITOR_MINIMUM_CHARACTERS /instance/org.eclipse.ui/VIEW_MINIMUM_CHARACTERS I'm sorry Jerome but we don't have any plans to add more settings to our already very crowded preferences pages. Perhaps we should add a feature similar to Firefox's about:config which exposes all preferences in a generic way for power users, without having to add clutter for most users. For why we are happy with showing the icons (Kevin can probably provide more detail): What we ended up with in 3.3 is essentially what Doug suggested in comment #3. The problem with the chevron is that it completely hides the fact that you have a view open, and in which view stack you can find it. It also reduces the probability that users with positional memory can successfully remember where their views are because picking a view from the chevron menu will reorder the tabs in a non-predictable way. We don't believe that what you said in comment #4 applies to the majority of users - there are other places (fast views, minimized view stack) where we only show the icon and assume that views are recognizable by just the icon. (In reply to comment #17) Not much to add, you said it all Boris. The belief is that the views are recognizable by their icons since the icons provide uniqueness. Truncated titles do not since the first letters can be the same. And as Boris mentions, there are additional problems with relying on the chevron. Boris and I previously discussed a power user text only keys/values prefs mechanism and yes this seems like a good candidate. But I'd like to first understand if this is simply "you're used to it working one way" or if there are usability failures you're now encountering. Maybe that's just me, but icons don't provide uniqueness. Usually icons are so close that I can't remember what they represent. Plain English is much easier to parse for me than an icon. So I prefer to have less tabs shown, but at least I can read the entire title of each tab, rather than all tabs shown where the only difference is the first letter and icons than all look the same to me. Also I don't understand the problem with chevrons. "it completely hides the fact that you have a view open" Right now, since I can't distinguish between my opened view, I'm not in a better spot. Also "picking a view from the chevron menu will reorder the tabs in a non-predictable way" sounds like a bug to me. Remy is now responsible for watching the [ViewMgmt] category. This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet. If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant. This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet. As such, we're closing this bug. If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it and reopen this bug. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant. -- The automated Eclipse Genie. |