Improved character selector

[Daniel Laidig]

On Monday 26 March 2007 15:40, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> What kind of use case does this GUI try to address?

Mostly to find a character quickly, but also to get some additional 
information on usage and to play around if you have too much time.

> I'd say that 90% of the users go into the Charselector to search for a
> glyph that is not accessible via the keyboard and have it copied into the
> clipboard (or similar) via pressing a button.

Agreed.

> So having a "search" line edit at the top doesn't really make sense unless
> you plan to look-up details via a keystroke which will likely be the
> minority of users. I also think that the details tab on the right covers
> way too many details presented by default.

As Thiago said, the search is very useful to find a character _really_ quick 
without having to think about the category/block.

> - Add a copy button to let the user copy the character into the clipboard

This is just the widget. Each apps creates its own buttons depending on its 
needs. Compare the KCharSelect app with the dialog in Konversation or KWord. 
Maybe it would be good to unify this, but this is another topic.

> - have the information panel not displayed by default but instead once you
> press a button "Details".

That button existed initially. However, it was removed to have a less 
cluttered interface. There is also the possibilty for apps to remove the 
detail widget completely.

I still don't know how to deal with this best.

> - Contact the usability people to review this dialog.

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&m=117269912217918&w=2
This is where this design was created.