toolbar icons

[David Nolden]

Am Mittwoch 05 August 2009 22:17:09 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> On 05.08.09 21:58:23, David Nolden wrote:
> > So what do you think?
>
> Not an option IMHO, we should be following the KDE setting here and thats
> text under icons by default. The reason has been given numerous times,
> icons don't tell you what they do unless you already know them from
> elsewhere. I've recently taken the test from Nuno about our new icons and I
> had a really hard time to identify the right icons for the given concept.
> (yes that might also mean that the icons themselves need improvement, but
> thats mostly our own fault, nuno has no idea how they should look like so
> we need to give him good input)
Most people have learned that there are other ways of finding out what an icon 
does (Tooltips). You don't need to see what the icon does in text all the 
time.

I think icons with text are mainly useful for _casual_ users. Someone who 
writes an email, and sometimes needs to attach a file, or someone using an 
image viewer and sometimes needs to rotate the image. But casual users are not 
the target audience of KDevelop.

I hate that argument personally, but _every_ other IDE I have ever seen 
screenshots of uses icon-only. They need the space for more useful stuff, and 
so do we.

> I can actually easily fit all three toolbars onto the screen without any
Even 1680 is a very high resolution, especially for a laptop. Most laptops are 
sold with 1280x1024 or similar, which is tiny in these measures, but perfectly 
fine for programming. Also I think adding such large whitespaces into the 
toolbar clutters the otherwise compact UI.
> context-browser line is usually working best when having its own line.
> On 1400 it starts to get crowded, either I make the quickopen line
> rather small (which isn't a big deal, because it'll expand as needed -
> btw it seems to expand larger as the mainwindow, that is a problem if my
> mainwindow is maximized!) or move something into its own line (IIRC
> thats the default for the new context browser).
Nothing should be in its own line. All these things fit nicely into one line, 
as you see on my screenshot. ;-) On my machine, the context browser actions 
are in the standard line.

> The screenshot above is also misleading, it contains the debug-actions
> which shouldn't be shown at all in the code area.
Yes sure, but with kate-actions instead of debugger-actions, it should look 
the same.

Greetings, David