RFC: KRecentFilesAction: hide urls

[Hans Meine]

Hi!

I agree that the current recent files menu looks quite cluttered and could 
obviously be improved.  "Hiding information is bad usability" is a simplified 
rule, and I would say showing unnecessary information distracts the user, 
makes UIs cluttered and is bad usability, too.

On Mittwoch 11 April 2007, Johnathan Burchill wrote:
> The KRecentFilesAction shows the full url path in square brackets behind
> the short name? I'd like to hide that url and just show the short name. If
> the same shortname is associated with more than one url, the short name
> would be appended with a unique identifier, like (2), (3), etc.

Why (2), (3) and not the path in brackets?  As I see it, you clean up the GUI 
for the case of different filenames, but hide information when it is 
important.

As an interesting example/idea from another app, I have this in my .emacs:

  ;; append directory names to buffers instead of foo<2> foo<3> ..
  (require 'uniquify)
  (setq uniquify-buffer-name-style 'post-forward)

Now buffers are named myclass.cpp, other.cpp, ... until I open a second 
README, when the buffers will show as README|ipython-0.8.0 and README|myapp 
(uniquify automatically appends just enough path components to allow 
discriminating the two).

Now I am not sure
a) How good that would look in the recent files menu.  (Having some short 
entries and some long ones.)
b) Whether there is a difference between local file paths and URLs which make 
the above idea less suitable for KDE (OTOH, I am using tramp to open remote 
files in emacs, and I did not suffer from any problems from a user's POV).
c) What usability people think about this.

Another quick improvement could be to "dim" the bracketed path in the recent 
files menu in order to reduce the length of the entries.  Even better, I 
would suggest to remove the filename from the URL in brackets, since it is 
already written at the front.

I made some quick mock-ups (in Gimp) for the latter two suggestions, alas not 
for the primary one:
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~meine/recentfiles-current.png
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~meine/recentfiles-dimmed.png
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~meine/recentfiles-short.png
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~meine/recentfiles-shortdimmed.png

-- 
Ciao, /  /                                                    .o.
     /--/                                                     ..o
    /  / ANS                                                  ooo
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