GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 789174
Req: splash screen is confusing and should be reworked
Last modified: 2017-10-21 23:02:05 UTC
Created attachment 361829 [details] proposal1 (sucks a little less than current splash screen) Welcome screen is confusing (at least). When you start there are 3 activable button file comparison / directory / version control and 2 disabled buttons (blank comparison / compare) (1) => hide the disabled buttons it will be less confusing When you chose the file comparison then the file/directory selector under File comparison becomes active. Ok I get It. But the file selector under the directory becomes active too ? => UI is confusing. Because source 2 is under the directory button one tend to believe that it is linked to directory when it is not. UI should be reworked. See proposal 1 that use vertical display for mode choosing and horizontal display for source selecting. At the very start I don't understand why we have to choose the comparison mode. OK I understand that it will change the behaviour of the selector. But IMHO this is bad. I hate the directory drop down selector. I ALWAYS want to go to other directory so I need to scroll down to select other then I need to scroll up to reach the path toolbar then scroll down again. It's just a waste of time It's a little better when you are in file mode (one less step). It will be ways better to do like winmerge => You don't care about choosing file vs directory. You choose a path and the app checks if the source match (if source1 is dir then source2 should be a dir too else it displays a warning and the compare button remains disabled) Then I don't understand the blank comparison concept. I mean I don't understand what is the difference between comparing empty sources and going for blank comparison. For me there's none so the "blank comparison" button should go. Otherwise it's confusing. You fill source 1 and hit "blank comparison" (instead of compare) and the entry chosen is lost. Finally the 3 way-comparison. Why do I have to click a checkbox to activate an additional selector. Why can't we just have a third active selector that you fill (or not). Why the extra step ? So for me we could go from 9 widgets (and countless clicks and scroll) to an easiest/cleanest 4 widgets
Created attachment 361830 [details] better proposal
>Because source 2 is under the directory button one tend to believe that it is linked to directory when it is not. Confirming: I'm using meld for several years and still think that the placing 3 buttons directly under unrelated mode selectors looks very confusing. As far as I remember when I saw this page for the first two times - I thought that it requires version control to make a 3-file comparison. Also some another confusing behavior on the page: every active button has a context menu corresponding to the tab header. It looks like a small bug.
(In reply to vincent.p.trashmail from comment #0) > At the very start I don't understand why we have to choose the comparison > mode. > OK I understand that it will change the behaviour of the selector. But IMHO > this is bad. > I hate the directory drop down selector. I ALWAYS want to go to other > directory so I need to scroll down to select other then I need to scroll up > to reach the path toolbar then scroll down again. It's just a waste of time > It's a little better when you are in file mode (one less step). I agree that using a file selector that allowed selection of both files and folders would be a good idea, but it's simply not a feature that the GTK+ file selector has. > Then I don't understand the blank comparison concept. > I mean I don't understand what is the difference between comparing empty > sources and going for blank comparison. For me there's none so the "blank > comparison" button should go. Otherwise it's confusing. You fill source 1 > and hit "blank comparison" (instead of compare) and the entry chosen is > lost. I can't agree here. This button was added as an explicit obvious way of creating an empty comparison so that people could paste into the buffer. Prior to this, people didn't realise that you could do this. > Finally the 3 way-comparison. Why do I have to click a checkbox to activate > an additional selector. Why can't we just have a third active selector that > you fill (or not). Why the extra step ? This is a little less clear, but basically this exists because we allow the selectors to be empty. This is in itself really annoying, because GTK+ does *not* want the selectors to be empty, but we did it for feature consistency with the previous UI. This *could* change, but it might be tricky to get the interaction right.
Thanks for taking the time to report this. 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 730385 ***