Re: combo rant

["David Necas (Yeti)" <yeti physics muni cz>]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 11:26:58PM +0200, Paul Pogonyshev wrote:
> It is the trade-off of the policy that "the selected item is under the pointer in
> the just shown popup, period."  I think it is generally good, but this is an example
> of where it shows its drawbacks.  However, for the sake of UI consistency, I believe
> it should _not_ be changed.  I.e. it be "under the pointer, period", not "under the
> pointer, but only if..."

It's funny you say that in a thread where intents to
make an alternative implementation were mentioned just a few
mails ago.  If a policy leads to consequences disliked so
much that people start implementing their own widgets,
you failed twice: first, you these new widgets will be far
more inconsistent, not speaking about follow the policy;
and second, you wasted these people time.

Incidentally, I implemented a few selectors with a button
bringing up a normal-treeviw recently too, exactly because
gtkcombobox was awful to use.

Second, policy `the items always appear in the same
positions (relative to the combo)' would be at least as much
consistent.  If the position was for exmple below combo, one
would be in trouble only if the combo was near bottom screen
edge, not any horizontal edge like now.

How many problems must a policy cause to make people realize
it's wrong?

> Maybe a keyboard
> shortcut for the popup that causes it to instantly be filled with items

[rant]Could this keyboard shortcut be made Ctrl-L, please?
This way one would not have to learn so many different
please-fix-this-widget keyboard shortcut.[/rant]

To the general usability of combo box.  The upper limit of
number of items until it becomes cumbersome is one thing and
has been discussed througly, I'd just say Gtk+ combo has
this limit quite low.  But there is a *lower* limit too.

How long is it since you've last seen a combo box with only
two or three choices that could be replaced with
radiobuttons (or even a yes/no checkbox!) immediately getting:
- visibility of all the choices
- posibility to assign mnemonics to individual choices
- constant positions of the choices
- fix of sceeen edge interaction problems
- fix of obscuring of other widgets
- ease of use (less clicks)
- improved accessibility
Hardly more than a few minutes ago...

Yeti


--
That's enough.