"Defaults" button in every settings screen

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:21:57 -0500
Michael Orlitzky <michael at orlitzky.com> wrote:

> On 12/09/2011 12:31 PM, Harald Judt wrote:
> >
> > Some thoughts on this:
> >
> > * Many settings in xfce are applied in real-time, and quite a lot of
> >     times, the effects are often visible immediately too.
> >     Example: Font size.
> >
> 
> But different settings have weird interactions. If you don't know
> that the font size is what's causing your Firefox "OK" dialog to
> render off-screen, you might try to change some other setting (that
> isn't broken). Now you have two problems.

Even with a "restore defaults" button there would still be problems:

  * If the user doesn't know what caused a dialog to render off-screen,
    how would he know where to restore defaults - in the app the dialog
    belongs to or in Xfce? 

  * It is not up to Xfce to decide what to restore and what to keep.
    E.g. if soneone changes the font size to the worse and wants to
    revert that... why not just change the font again? How would Xfce
    know that the user wants to restore only the default (or previous?)
    font size? Really, we can't add a restore default button for every
    single option.

  * I would bet that users would be afraid to click on "restore
    defaults" because they don't know "default" is a state they will be
    happy with. Maybe they changed 20 options in the meantime and now
    they are supposed to lose them all just because the font size is
    wrong? 

I may sound harsh but I think implementing this idea is not worth the
effort given that most of our options take effect instantly. For some
(like keyboard shortcuts) we do have "restore defaults", and I think
that is enough.


  - Jannis