[PATCH] Permanent clear button for KLineEdit

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:26:32AM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 March 2009, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:01:30PM +0100, Michael Leupold wrote:
> > > attached patch makes it possible to set the clear button on KLineEdits
> > > permanently shown (not hidden if there's no content).
> >
> > when this came up a few weeks ago, several people agreed that the
> > disappearing clear button in bad ui design.
> 
> can you explain more, please?
> 
> here's the rational for the appearing/disappearing button:
> 
> * it signals when there is something it can actually do; no text? it doesn't 
> do anything. why be there
> 
why? because changing uis are *bad*, and you ought to know that.
combined with other adverse circumstances it can lead to reports like
this one: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183861 (yes, it's mine)

> * it cuts down on visual noise. when they are always on and you have a
> dialog with a bunch of blank text fields is looks a lot worse and the
> user is confronted with a lot more visual noise for no reason at all
> 
i don't buy into that. following that logic we could make *a lot* of ui
elements jump and hide on each state transition. the usual approach to
signalling a n/a state is disabling the widget (if we go that route,
michael's api extension would make sense again).