[kde-guidelines] Styleguide: Status bar

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 03 October 2013 11:51:45 Teo Mrnjavac wrote:

> > My two cents: A standard application concists of a main menu, tool bar,
> > and
> > status bar (and a navigation area and a content area). Moving any part off
> > the main window (by default) is gnomish or apple'ish. The real KDE way
> > would be to have an option to switch status bars on/off, in general. But
> > if
> > we allow users to get rid of the status bar we need to define an
> > alternative way to present the information (which might be comprehensive).
> > I don't think all programs should have special, fancy pop-ups in rekonq
> > style for 'short term info', and I would call it an abuse to feed "long
> > term stuff" into the title bar. I vote for keeping it.
> 
> I haven't been following the discussion on Plasma, but what should be "the
> real KDE way" is a matter of debate. The KDE way is what KDE wants it to be
> ;)
> 
> My reasoning is that in the days of 16:9 displays vertical space is
> precious. There are applications where having a status bar can objectively
> make sense, e.g. when there is constantly changing status info which would
> be too annoying to do with notifications or other elements (think
> KTorrent). On the other hand, my KMail spends 99% of its time with a status
> bar that just says "Ready", that's hardly efficient use of vertical space.
> I also find it a bit outdated as a design, but that's quite subjective.
> 
> The guideline could simply say
> * Provide a status bar in the main window of an application if the
> application needs to constantly show relevant and changing status
> information.

I agree with Teo here: I don't think a status bar should be a must-have 
component of every standard GUI. If it contains useful information, it's worth 
the space it occupies, but if it has no real use, it wastes vertical space 
and, frankly, an empty gray bar also looks rather ugly.