GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 768381
Text styling improvements
Last modified: 2016-07-08 17:11:03 UTC
I find that the current text styling in the conversation view doesn't help me to focus on the important parts of a conversation, or to differentiate different parts of a conversation. In particular: * nicks aren't prominent enough * status messages and timestamps are too prominent * /me messages aren't differentiated I'd suggest: * making nicks bold * making status messages and timestamps grey (and regular weight) * using italics for /me messages
(In reply to Allan Day from comment #0) > * making status messages and timestamps grey They are already supposed to be dimmed, but it broke when Lapo started to use 'opacity' for the .dim-label class instead of graying out the color itself. I'll attach a fix for that issue.
Created attachment 330870 [details] [review] chatView: Consider opacity style property for theme colors GTK+ has supported an 'opacity' CSS property for a while, and designers have used it to dim elements (namely: .dim-label). This is not reflected by the return value of gtk_style_context_get_color() though, which returns the exact color as defined in the theme. To correctly get the intended appearance, we need to apply the opacity to the returned color.
Review of attachment 330870 [details] [review]: looked it through looks good to me.
Comment on attachment 330870 [details] [review] chatView: Consider opacity style property for theme colors Attachment 330870 [details] pushed as 1697d31 - chatView: Consider opacity style property for theme colors
With that fix out of the way (which involved fixing a gjs issue), the other suggestions are newcomer-friendly, so marking as such.
Created attachment 330925 [details] polari with attachment 330870 [details] [review] applied That patch was definitely a nice improvement. I want to chime in and express my opinions on some of the other suggestions. :-) (In reply to Allan Day from comment #0) > * nicks aren't prominent enough I disagree at the moment, but maybe you can help me understand. What are you having trouble with here? Are you stating this in comparison to the IRCCloud client you are coming from? I don't know which version of Polari you are using but I am attaching a picture of how polari looks to me on master as reference. > * status messages and timestamps are too prominent that should be fixed now, the attached picture has florian's patch applied. > * /me messages aren't differentiated Florian's patch also helped a lot on this. > I'd suggest: > > * making nicks bold Apart from that I dont see a solution necessary at the moment, I'm also not a fan of this particular solution to create prominence. It would create an overlap with our use of bold to emphasize highlights. > * making status messages and timestamps grey (and regular weight) Making timestamps regular weight sounds good. > * using italics for /me messages I don't feel strong about this but I'd be careful with going all script-like. I do see it used in other clients, though. Motly this is just my gut feeling, but i also dug up a dusty quote from litterature: "Italics quickly loose their force. Seldom should as much as a sentence be italicized for emphasis and never an entire passage."[1] To me, florians patch made the /me messages more than prominent enough. What do you judge from the attached screenshot? [1] Chicago Manual Of Style (7.49, 15th edition)
(In reply to Bastian Ilsø from comment #6) > Created attachment 330925 [details] > polari with attachment 330870 [details] [review] [review] applied That looks better in general! > > * nicks aren't prominent enough > > I disagree at the moment, but maybe you can help me understand. What are you > having trouble with here? Are you stating this in comparison to the IRCCloud > client you are coming from? I don't know which version of Polari you are > using but I am attaching a picture of how polari looks to me on master as > reference. It's a general observation rather than a comparative one: when you are scanning a conversation for a particular message, the nick is often the first piece of information you try to pick out. At the moment, I find that the nicks are a bit difficult to make out in these cases. Every other app I've looked at uses bold for nicks/user names, probably for this reason: Slack, IRCCloud, Colloquy, Textual. I do wonder whether the blue colour helps to make nicks easy to read and am a bit unsure about whether the blue is helpful. Simply using grey to indicate when someone is offline and black when they are online might be enough. ... > > I'd suggest: > > > > * making nicks bold > > Apart from that I dont see a solution necessary at the moment, I'm also not > a fan of this particular solution to create prominence. It would create an > overlap with our use of bold to emphasize highlights. I don't see why the overlap would be a problem. mentions and nicks are both important pieces of information that deserve visual prominence. > > * making status messages and timestamps grey (and regular weight) > > Making timestamps regular weight sounds good. Yeah I think that would really help. > > * using italics for /me messages > > I don't feel strong about this but I'd be careful with going all > script-like. I do see it used in other clients, though. ... The use of italics is somewhat controversial and even goes against our own guidelines. That said it does work in terms of differentiating the text and there is a convention to use italics to indicate an aside, which means that it works stylistically in this case. > To me, florians patch made the /me messages more than prominent enough. What > do you judge from the attached screenshot? That makes them grey, which makes them less prominent than regular messages. They should be at least as prominent as these.
Created attachment 331067 [details] Screenshot of the suggested changes I played around a bit in the inspector: - bold nicknames - normal weight for timestamps - italic style of actions (I also changed the color of the latter to black, but I cannot screenshot that, as the color is changed back on focus changes) I'll be happy with anything you settle on, but for what it's worth, I don't think the bold nicks conflict with highlighting - the messages still stick out just fine to my eyes.
Looks great to me!
Created attachment 331069 [details] [review] chatView: Tweak text styling The current styling emphasizes some secondary elements too much, while not emphasizing other important parts enough. Try to address this by: - making nicknames bold - use normal weight for timestamps - differentiate actions by using italic style instead of dimming their color
Review of attachment 331069 [details] [review]: i think we might want the label in the nickButton to be bold to be consistent with the styling in the chatview. I'll probably continue to dislike having bold all over the place for a while but beyond that lgtm. :-)
Created attachment 331099 [details] [review] chatView: Tweak text styling Makes sense to me.
Created attachment 331103 [details] [review] entryArea: Filter out BACKDROP state from nick button While talking about consistency - this has kinda bothered me for a while, so I'd like an opinion on this change as well (the code is a bit of a hack, but effective ...) We want the button to blend in with the chat log, however when the toplevel window doesn't have focus, active nicks in the log keep their color, while the nick button (and thus the user's own nick) is grayed out and dimmed. Work around this issue by filtering out the BACKDROP state altogether.
Attachment 331099 [details] pushed as 1af3ec5 - chatView: Tweak text styling Attachment 331103 [details] pushed as b8adca9 - entryArea: Filter out BACKDROP state from nick button