GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 561799
Simplify language selection in message composer
Last modified: 2018-10-30 10:02:11 UTC
To cater to people that write messages in different languages, evolution allows changing the language of the current message and spell-check in this new language. Unfortunately the "new language list" is just a dump of the spell checkers installed on the system. On a shared system with several hunspell packs installed, it is very long (especially given that each variant of Castillan or English has a separate entry). The result does not even fit on a big widescreen! Please simplify this selection by making it two level: 1. level one: the 4-5 most recently used languages for the current user 2. level two: a proper language list in a separate window instead of the current giant menu list evolution-2.25.1-2.fc11.x86_64
*** Bug 567574 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Reporter of bug #567574 pointed to an interesting looking Thunderbird addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3993 Just making a note of it here so I don't lose it. @Nicolas: Do you know of any other apps that have what you're describing, or something similar? I'd rather have a model for this feature than wind up reinventing it poorly.
yes these are similar bugs, but the problems are not exactly the same. Nevertheless, they can be solved at the same time. In this bug, the problem is that in the list there might be many variants of the same language, if these are installed on the system. The method used in the thunderbird extension does not solve the problem of Nicolas, as in his case, he would click many times to go through all the variants of, for example, Spanish.
Unfortunately, I only know that the current way results in a list much too long for my poor screen. Ideally someone should implement a desktop-wide language switcher like under windows so people do not have to select the right spellchecker manually in every other app. (I say 'language' not 'input' switcher because there are different IM/layouts that can be used to input the same language, and the same IM/layout can be used to input several languages, so you can't deduce one from the other without a user-provided mapping table).
(In reply to comment #4) > Ideally someone should implement a desktop-wide language switcher like under > windows so people do not have to select the right spellchecker manually in > every other app. Agreed, though we're still waiting on a standard spell checking API for GObject/GTK. That will have to come first before we see a standard preference app under System -> Preferences. GtkHtml is already using something close to the current proposal. Back to the issue at hand... I've been toying with the idea of a Firefox-style sidebar for choosing spell checking languages (and possibly also for choosing the character encoding and input method). This wouldn't be a sidebar you leave open all the time; it would function more like a dialog. Open it, pick stuff, close it. Advantages: 1) It would solve the "navigate the menu N times to pick N languages" problem. Open the sidebar, pick your languages, close it. 2) It would put the language list into a scrolled window, allowing for hundreds of languages in extreme cases. We could also implement a "recently used" sublist at the top of the sidebar. 3) Type-ahead navigation, since the list would appear in a GtkTreeView.
So this is about "Edit > Current Languages". A button in the composer tool bar might make sense (there should be some report about it).
From bug 645414: --- Comment 2 Dan Vrátil 2011-06-01 14:36:42 UTC I've look on the code and this feature will be kinda problem to implement. The menu is not managed by Evolution, but it's created and managed by GtkHTMLEditor. I'm not sure if the GtkHTMLEditor is capable of per-application configuration, but I doubt it and I believe we can't have if (is_evolution) {....} else {...} code in GtkHTML. --- Comment 3 Matthew Barnes 2011-06-01 15:29:46 UTC Once the WebKit transition is underway, I'm going to move GtkhtmlEditor and all related code into Evolution so we'll have a lot more flexibility then. Only reason GtkhtmlEditor still lives in the GtkHtml package is because it uses private GtkHTML APIs. GtkHTML doesn't expose enough of its own APIs publicly to write a suitable HTML editor in Evolution. But WebKit does.
*** Bug 645414 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is related to bug #210577 and bug #228772
Evolution doesn't use any status bar in the composer, there's only the bar with attachments. Adding anything to it might be misleading, I'm afraid (the spell-check language is not related to attachments). From the above I understood that Matthew would use a button in the tool bar, which might be better also when multiple languages are selected for spell-checking (Thunderbird seem to support only one language being selected). I'm not sure of the icon to be used there, because a flag is not good (bug #210577 comment #4 and the next two comments after it). It might not be a new popup window, those are kind of bad, but with newer gtk+ (in compare with the version in 2012), there could be used a GtkPopover. I'm unsure how to call it from the menu, what would it point to? Probably to the icon on the tool bar, which cannot be hidden by the user. Maybe I'm just getting lazy, but I'd use the menu as before, only make it "cascading", with the "recently used" section as suggested above. That would avoid the idea of not opening the menu N times when N languages are going to be selected, but I'd guess, in that need, user selects them in Edit->Preferences->Composer Preferences->Spell Checking tab instead. I can change my mind in the future.
Created commit 6a0409a985 in evo master (3.31.2+)