Toolview Buttons

Andreas Pakulat apaku at gmx.de
Fri Jul 17 15:34:33 UTC 2009


Hi,

Nuno just talked to us on IRC and suggested that we don't rotate the
text on the toolview buttons as it breaks alignment and is also harder
to read.

I think I convinced him that there's currently no suitable alternative to 
the rotated text because anything horizontal takes too much space if the
toolviews are hidden.

He suggested to remove the text in that case and I have to admit that it
doesn't look that bad without text. Additionally eclipse seems to do it
this way too, i.e. hidden toolviews are only shown by an icon (and of
course with proper tooltip) and if they're shown there's a horizontal
header (which we also have). So how about doing that, but allowing to
re-add the (rotated) text by an option in the ui-settings?

Additionally Nuno suggests to not rotate the icons as that also makes
recognizing them a bit harder. Personally I feel non-rotated icons look
a bit weird if the text is rotated, but they look better if there's no
text. So we might want to connect this with the option of hiding the
text.

Patch attached should work for any toolbuttonstyle except
TextUnderIcons, so you can just change it in ideal.cpp, IdealToolButton
constructor.

For easier comparison here are some screenshots:

1. No text, upright icons:
http://www.apaku.de/vardata/kdevelop_toolviews_no_text_no_rotated_icon.png

2. No text, but icon rotated:
http://www.apaku.de/vardata/kdevelop_toolviews_no_text_rotated_icon.png

3. Text, upright icons:
http://www.apaku.de/vardata/kdevelop_toolviews_text_no_rotated_icon.png

4. Text, rotated icons (this is current trunk/):
http://www.apaku.de/vardata/kdevelop_toolviews_text_rotated_icon.png

So 1 and 4 would be the two options to choose from IMHO. Other opinions?

Andreas

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