[rkward-devel] quick (hopefully) feature request: show some NA info in data editor

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Thursday 09 October 2014 17:05:10 meik michalke wrote:
> > (Now, next you'll want a more obvious method to differentiate between NA
> > and "" while _entering_ strings...)
> 
> hm. actually, i think it's already quite all right: <del> makes a cell NA,
> if you don't double-click it. but it is indeed a bit unintuitive that for
> *string* columns, it's enough to double-click a cell to change its value
> from NA to "", whereas for all other column types the value doesn't change.

true, but not so easy to fix. Double click opens the editor widget, and it's 
not so trivial to track what's going on in there. All we see is that the 
editor (after closing it/switching to another cell) holds an empty string, and 
we can't really assume this means the user did not want to touch the NA, 
either.

Let's just assume, users don't double click cells without intending to edit 
them? At least now it's easy enough to see the effect.
 
> also, just a minor issue: the R console only shows string NAs as "<NA>", all
> others as "NA". don't know if we need that level of equivalence, but it
> might confuse some users to see a "string NA" when it should be a "numeric
> NA" (or whatever) in a cell.

In the interest of simplicitly, I think I'll just ignore that.

> > Well, that's more difficult, indeed. One option would be showing all
> > strings quoted, but I'd say that's not without potential for confusion,
> > either...
> a start could be more consistency: when you fill a string cell with more
> text than its width, it is truncated by "..." to indicate there's more.
> firstly, it would be better to color the "..." also in that light grey now,
> so you don't confuse it with actual string values; secondly, these dots are
> currently missing if the value ends with lots of space characters. this
> makes untrimmed values hard to see.
> 
> showing light grey quotes might actually not be so confusing. it could be
> made configurable via the format field (or globally).

Again, not so trivial. ATM, all rendering is done by Qt. We just provide the 
text to display, and _one_ foreground color. Rendering can be customized, but 
that's not something to mess with at this stage. You could add it to the RFE 
tracker.
 
> by the way, is there a way to configure the font yet? for some cases, a
> monospace font would be more useful than the current default.

Nope. But we already have a tracker item for that, IIRC ;-)

Regards
Thomas
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