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Now that there's a hover affordance for show filtered children, I sort of want affordances for remove from context and mark as landmark (MS Office style I guess). I don't know if it's really a good idea, but I've always felt like those actions are useful to have, but too hard to get to for the value they provide, i.e. it's usually not worth the trouble of right clicking and finding them in the enormous context menu. Having affordances would also mean you wouldn't have to select the item (which switches editors) to perform those actions, and that we could eventually remove those options from the menu.
I think that this could be a really good idea as well. The question is how would this look with 3 icons per hover instead of 1. Maybe will mock something up and see how usable/cluttered it would be.
We should also consider that there are some problems with the exisiting affordance. I'm thinking of how it sometimes is clipped, that it doesn't always draw over the Windows tree tooltip, and bug 341589.
I am a bit worried that adding additional affordances would add significant complexity and make it difficult to pick the right button. Sam, how frequently do you use mark as landmark and remove from context? Generally, the context framework should manage the context through monitoring interactions and there should rarely be a need to manually change interest on elements. Just curious if this isn't working as expected and if there is something else that could be done to optimize the context mangement.
I would say I use them once in a while. I think the main use for remove from context is after some exploration where I realise the code I was exploring is not relevant (or if I started briefly working on something else without switching context, because I forgot or had files with unsaved changes). I don't think there is any way for this to be automatically detected, although I could imagine having some way of explicitly partitioning the interaction history, like a sub-context switch... I mainly use mark as landmark when I find something that I know is important and I may not be interacting much with the important element right away, but I don't want to lose it. I'm not sure we want to encourage people to use these actions a lot though, or to create the perception that they are often needed... Perhaps it could be an advanced/experimental option you have to turn on if you want it.
I think that I am with Steffen on this now and that it would cause too much clutter for the little that they are used. Should we mark this as wontfix?
I think I agree. It would sort of be nice if I could hold down a key and click to perform those actions, but I can't see what keys could be used for that.
Sounds good. Will mark as WONTFIX for now.
