GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 155099
oversize buttons for = and possible other very important tasks
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
real life physical calculators tend to have oversize buttons for things like = because it is a very important and frequently used button and making it bigger makes it easier to hit. I am suggesting that equals = button be double the size of the other buttons. (double the height or width not both) (if the layout could be ajusted so that = was on the bottom right consistant with the action button in most gnome dialogs and some caclulators that would be even better but I realise that could be a pain to do)
After doing a Google image search for "calculator" and looking at the top hits returned, I'm not at all convinced that "real life physical calculators tend to have oversize buttons for things like = because it is a very important...". The Google results showed a mix of different calculators, and only some of them had oversized "=" buttons. I also am of the opinion that software calculator users will tend to use the keyboard rather than the mouse, so there is no reason why you can't use the oversized Enter button on your number pad (assuming it's got one). There was also a wish (on the desktop-devel mailing list) for the "=" key to be in the bottom right corner because that's where it tends to be on real-life calculators. Again, from looking at the google images returned, I'm not convinced this is true either. In short, I'm not going to make these suggested changes.
For the record, my wanting the = on the bottom right has more do to with Gnome putting the action buttons to the bottom right than it did with my having a calculator with = equals on the bottom right. Accepting and verifying. Thanks anway for your consideration.