GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 791181
Simplifying language settings
Last modified: 2018-01-11 10:48:41 UTC
Currently, the language settings are just a way too long list of languages, of which most are never ever used by the average programmer. We should keep things simple and ordered – and as such, don’t display unused settings, as these just lead to avoidable overwhelming and confusion. The search function also isn’t of use here, because mostly you use a few languages, and searching for every single language and configuring it repeatedly is way too much cumbersome work and would likely lead to forgetting something. I’d like to target this problem by two approaches: First: Introducing a “Default” or “General” settings category, which lets us hide *all* languages in the list completely at first (since the pre-set defines every single language to use the default settings). Second: Then we make customized language settings available at explicit demand: We therefore need a “plus” button at the bottom of the language list for adding custom languages. Further characteristics: • When the “plus” icon gets clicked, the list of all available languages should be displayed inside the right pane – for letting the user select a language to add to the list. • The per-language-settings should add two entries: – A “trash” icon for removing the language entry from the list. – A “Use default settings” switch, which deactivates this language entry and greys out both the language name in the list, and all the according settings (think of how the dconf defaults work). I’ll add a first mock-up, when I’m finished.
Created attachment 364872 [details] First mock-up Here is my proposal. I think the language search bar (at the left side) should just be displayed if there are more than 10 languages in the list. The “Add” button I first forgot at drawing, should be right below the scroll list.
(In reply to Frank from comment #1) > Created attachment 364872 [details] > First mock-up > We already have search for preferences, and it searches everything (if not it's a bug). I don't think we should have multiple overlapping search features. It might be interesting to add a "Defaults" settings and select it by default though. We could also look at sorting languages that have changes higher than those which do not.
While the left search widget just reflects the current implementation, the right search widget should only filter the language list when it gets shown in “add mode”. I made this proposal primary for hiding all never-used stuff (what currently tends to be about 90…95% of that whole list for most users). For example system programmers like me often just need ~5 languages (Rust, C, C++, maybe Bash) and that’s about it. Same case with beginners who shouldn’t get flooded with options [1]. Another benefit here is, that everyone starts with just the very minimal set of options to chose (i.e. the defauts), and everybody then can extend that up to the level he/she likes or really needs. When a custom language setting gets added, you then can of course preset those settings with the customized defaults you currently have implemented – then it would be just two clicks away, but with the UI totally cleaned up. [1] I last week spent one full day at work, setting up Code Composer Studio (Texas Instruments’ Eclipse-modification), because there are about 300 settings for addressing their microcontrollers (with some even being shown several times O_o) and CCS being pretty touchy, additionally. At the end of the day, I came to the conclusion, that I just needed about six of them…
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