Upgrade woes

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday August 25 2017 22:40:06 Daniel Vrátil wrote:

> Anyhow, in Settings -> Spellchecker try disabling automatic detection of 
> language and just choose en_GB. I don't know how the autodetection works, but 
> maybe it just defaults to en_US if it sees English. 

It tends (or used) to work not too bad for sufficiently different languages like English and French (and that's where it comes in handy), but I wouldn't trust it between en_GB and en_US or pt_PT and pt_BR...


> > Two fine-tuning aspects are important to me but have gone missing. First, I
> > can't choose the font of the folder list, so it wastes space and now needs a
> > vertical scroll bar. 
> 
> Was that ever even customizable?

In KMail4 : Appearance/Fonts/Use custom fonts/Apply to "Folder List"


> Message list font options have been removed and KMail follows your system-wide 
> font settings - you can only choose color now. This wasn't a young hotshot 

But what system-wide font setting? AFAIK there's no font-to-use-for-listviews. I run into this problem with KDevelop too: most all tree views use a too large font or else I'm forced to select a smaller standard font than is comfortable.

> removing features just for the sake of removing features, but being able to 
> pre-calculate sizes of all the message list entries lead to massive speed up 
> when opening folders - previously we had to calculate dimensions for each 
> entry individually which is very expensive.

I don't understand, how can that not be required by just using a default font, and even if so, why would turning off the "use custom fonts" option not remove that expensive requirement?

I do understand that maintaining the associated code is expensive too, but we're also talking about a speed/usability trade-off. 

What if the user selects a message list display mode where columns are always the same width (exactly as I want them)? I'd think that you wouldn't need to precalculate anything dimensions then, rather than letting Qt do its job. If that's correct, couldn't you consider bringing back the font customisation via simple listwidget->setFont() call and disable the fancier message list modes that can't cope with that?

> We agreed that it makes more sense to follow system-wide default, since the 
> gain is much huge speedup and less code for us to maintain ;-)

Hmm, I think I might have to dive back into my favourite widget style and see if one can impose a global font for list view items in there...

R