[PATCH] "Show only important text" mode for toolbars

[Simon Edwards]

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 05:43, Frans Englich wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 September 2004 02:20, Peter Rockai (mornfall) wrote:
> > I spoke with Aaron yesterday on IRC about toolbar plans for 3.4 and I 
asked
> > what about the text-alongside-icons mode and overly long texts. He
> > suggested adding a flag like textImportant to the actions and a checkbox
> > (and toolbar context menu item) to show/hide "unimportant" texts. 

> I don't know the purpose of the text-along-icons option(enlighten me); that 
> must be clear before any decisions about it is taken. 

I'm not sure if this is the intended use of this feature, but I see this as a 
useful solution to the following problem:

In KDE have the option between having toolbars with text turned on which gives 
you toolbars that are way too big, wide and generally run off the window and 
get cut off which is annoying. The other option is toolbars with no text 
which gives you nice compact toolbars that fit on screen but then you are 
left with the problem that often it is not possible to know what an icon does 
by just by looking at it. Maybe the icon is bad, of it represents some 
abstract action which no artist could ever make a good icon for, whatever. 
Point is that often icons fail to communicate.

It looks like this patch would provide a _very_ useful compromise between all 
icons+no text and icons+text. Icons that are cryptic get a text label, while 
rest stays sans text and compact.

This patch should also be the default, IMHO.

cheers,

-- 
Simon Edwards             | Guarddog Firewall
simon at simonzone.com       | http://www.simonzone.com/software/
Nijmegen, The Netherlands | "ZooTV? You made the right choice."