[Usability]Re: gnome-terminal encoding UI

[Michael Toomim <toomim uclink4 berkeley edu>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Here is a possible gnome-terminal UI which is similar to Mozilla's but
> a bit less complex (no autodetect, and no More submenu):
>
>   http://pobox.com/~hp/terminal-encoding.png
>
> I wanted to have some visible feedback about the current encoding, so
> I tried this corny thing where the menu is titled according to the
> current encoding and right-justified.

I don't like high visibility of the menu.  Most people (I'll bet) have 
absolutely no clue about what an encoding is.

I'm one of those people.  Seeing "Current Locale (ISO-8859-15)" as a 
first-class object on my terminal makes me feel intimidated.  It makes 
me feel like it's an important setting that I *should* be managing as I 
work with gnome-terminal, and the fact that I don't know anything about 
it makes me afraid of using gnome-terminal at all, for fear of breaking 
things.  Compounding the issue is the fact that gnome-terminal is 
*already* pretty scary, just by virtue of being a terminal.  As a 
result, I think that this makes the terminal less accessible to naive users.

Can this become a profile option instead, maybe under the 
"compatibility" tab?  I get the feeling that only a very small 
percentage of users will want to change this option frequently, and that 
it would consequently be ok to let them flip between different profiles 
in order to change it back and forth.  Alternatively, one could just 
leave the "compatibility" dialog open, displaying the encoding/locale 
drop-menu, and achieve an effect similar to the top-level menu proposed.