GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 610497
Preferences window should widen
Last modified: 2012-07-28 12:39:20 UTC
The Preferences window in Gedit does not widen (nor dynamically or by dragging) to fit the descriptions of the plugins. Since Greek (and probably other languages as well) generally requires longer words/phrases to express the same meaning, descriptions are cut by the width of the window. Screenshot: http://www.ubuntu-pics.de/bild/43338/screenshot_001_4EmAXv.png It should probably be capable to widen by dragging.
IMO, We should make the window resizable and show the plugin description in a tooltip when the mouse is over the plugin
I think there is a problem with the plugins tab too. Maybe the usability team could be asked about this. In OSX some preferences panes, when selected, make the preferences window maximizable. It would be a good idea to implement that behavior in gedit. Also showing the plugin description in a tooltip would be ok. I'm cc'ing to usability team; I don't know if it is ok that a regular user do that.
So, there are a couple of UI guidelines that apply in this situation, though I don't recall without checking if they're explicitly stated in the HIG: (a) a window whose content is known in advance should open large enough to show all of that content, provided that does not make the window unreasonably large. ("Unreasonable" is of course slightly subjective...) (b) If a window contains an area whose content is or may be scrollable, that window should be resizable, and resizing should affect the size of the scrollable area. I'd say the Preferences window falls under (a), since the current list of Plugins and their descriptions is known before the window opens. The content of the Font & Colors tab should also be considered when choosing the initial size of the dialog, as the content of the list on that tab is also clipped at present. It wouldn't hurt to make the window resizable too. But I suspect there's probably no need for it to be, unless people start coming up with overly-long plugin/colour scheme descriptions (which should be discouraged). There shouldn't really be any need to clip a succinct single sentence description, even when translated into German etc.
Actually now that there are tooltips in the plugins tabs is this really a problem?
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 415143 ***