Can we* prettyplease do something about the KUrlNavigator?

[Thomas Lübking]

Am Thursday 18 June 2009 schrieben Sie:
> Originally I did not intend to reply, as I like to discuss such details
> without terms like "sucks", "period", "worst part". Especially when we
> should work together to improve some things, this is no good start...

;-)
i warned this could turn a little rant. this thing just annoyed me for about a 
year now and i always thought it would have been trapped in some sort of 
"proof of concept" implementation.

no offense intended.

> Generally if something is as broken as you indicate by your mail below, we
> get a lot of bug reports at bugs.kde.org or endless discussions at
> usability at kde.org This is not the case here, so the chances are good that
> we did not create a "usability monster" at all ;-)
i didn't say "it's unusable" - just it s... well, i guess you know what i said 
=D

> OK. Please note that the default line edit offers a lot of functionality
> regarding text completion, which is used by people out there (I know this
> from feedback at bugs.kde.org). No matter what you intend to do with the
> breadcrumb mode, the default line editor functionality must remain.
i did (certainly) not intend to remove the lineedit at all, just make the 
breadcrumb mode more look like a lineedit - so the user gets a better idea of 
what this is meant for and a less hard UI transition when the mode changes.

> Assuming we don't remove the button completely as you suggest: Which icon
> do you suggest?
a pointing hand / arrow cursor and an I-beam?
most important the button should not hide and show depending on the mode, 
second important (because of symmetrics, UI feng shui, whatever....) be rather 
a pushbutton like the prepending icon and third i'm still not convinced it's 
ever necessary at all.
Reason:
The lineedit functionality more or less is only available when it has the 
focus.
When it does not have the focus it can fallback to the breadcrumb look (if you 
want to c'n'p you need to focus it. if you want to read path entries that 
overflow the lineedit length, you'll have to focus it and actually i am not 
aware of any lineedit functionality that doe /not/ require it to have the 
focus (except displaying (parts of) it's content...)

> Please be aware that the breadcrumb mode per default shows a simplified
> URL, while in the edit mode the full URL will be shown. E. g.
i am, thanks anyway.

> breadcrumb:
> Pictures > 2009 > June
>
> edit mode:
> file://home/jeff/Documents/Pictures/2009/June
>
> I don't intend to change this default behavior during the KDE 4.x cycle. So
> no matter which colors etc. you use for the breadcrumb, the main problem
> will be to provide a smooth transition from "Pictures > 2009 > June" to
> "file://home/jeff/Documents/Pictures/2009/June"
one could crossfade the text but that wasn't my problem (and could be rather 
contraproductive as it's an "even harder to notice" change)

my problem with the Urlnavigator as it is, is that it puts some massive change 
onto the UI structure (what's more like a problem than a content change)
clicking into the navigator and then being a "pro" representation of the 
contents with advanced functionality is no problem at all and as the lineedit 
looses the focus as soon as the window gets deactivated, a user should sooner 
or later be aware of the system (it's not /that/ hard ;-)

> I object at this point. I don't like to change the look of the breadcrumb
> view to a lineedit-look (= white background etc.) The breadcrumb mode and
> the editable mode are modes with a different behavior and should be
> visually distinguishable too.
as long as they're not empty, they'd by the content (lineedits usually don't 
contain triangles...) but I'd probably happy with Aurélian's mock asn well.

> Please don't forget that there is a different content in the breadcrumb
> mode and the line edit mode -> just underlining and changing colors is not
> enough...
i was just referring to the hover effect in the breadcrumb mode - i do 
/entirely/ not intend /any/ change in the lineedit mode - i like lineedits as 
they're right now =)
Currently the effect resembles (in a way) the look look of an itemview what 
may sound correct but is esp. regarding the label look imo rather out of 
place.
if one then would agree to push the breadcrumb look (only the frame and or 
background, not the content...) towards a lineedit a link-a-like look would 
have my favor just beacuse it's more or less (and in a text context rather 
/is/) the default way to indicate that a text-only item can be "activated"

Regards,
Thomas