D12529: Paste dropped files and folders as text by default

[Nathaniel Graham]

ngraham added a comment.


  That's a great question, Kurt! Generally I try to ask the following questions:
  
  1. "What do competing offerings have as the default settings?" Whatever that it, it's likely to be what users are most accustomed to and will expect. This should be weighted very heavily unless the industry standard is truly terrible and users hate it :)
  2. "What's the balance of complaints in Bugzilla tickets and online forums?" If the same issues get complained about over and over again, that's a pretty good indication that something should be changed.
  3. "What does my usability training say about the subject?" I'm really not trying to cast myself as an expert here, because there are always two sides to any argument. But I've studied this stuff for years.
  4. "What would be best for typical users of this program performing typical workflows?" This requires really putting yourself in the shoes of an average user of the program, and envisioning common workflows.
  
  For this particular matter, here are my answers:
  
  1. Industry standard is paste-as-text by default, and it's not a default that users seem to hate.
  2. Online, I see more complaints in general about the KDE drag-and-drop menu then I do defense of it in response.
  3. Good defaults are key for usability. That means common actions should be easy, and uncommon actions should be possible. It's rarely a good trade-off to make common actions slower or more frustrating in exchange for making it easier to perform uncommon ones. All of this is neatly encapsulated with our "simple by default, powerful when needed" motto.
  4. Because of #1, most of the time someone drags a file or folder into Konsole, it's because they want to use it as an argument to a command-line program, because that's what they're used to doing in any other terminal program they've used (users of terminal programs tend to have experience with multiple platforms). This therefore becomes the common case we should make easy, per #3. Dragging an item to Konsole to move, copy, or link it is much less common because you'd be dragging from your file manager that can already easily accomplish these tasks. By displaying the drag menu by default, we burden the common workflow by making users click through it, for the benefit ofmaking the uncommon actions easier. Not a good trade-off, usability-wise.
  
  Hopefully that explains my thought process a bit better!

REPOSITORY
  R319 Konsole

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D12529

To: ngraham, #konsole, hindenburg, #vdg
Cc: #plasma, herrold, ngraham, hindenburg
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