Xfce usability thoughts (was: Cobind desktop feat. Xfce)

[edscott wilson garcia]

El lun, 31-05-2004 a las 09:29, Benedikt Meurer escribió:


> > XFFM. I have a love/hate relationship with XFFM. On the one hand, I 
> > think some of the ways that it works are fantastic, particularly with 
> > regard to feedback and it's message status window. On the other hand, 
> > it's management of screen real estate (not using the full width of the 
> > screen and forcing to much vertical scrolling as a result) and font 
> > sizing (too large on average) is maddening. When users adjust fonts from 
> > the toolbar, they expect all of the fonts to change, not just the object 
> > that has focus. Why not use GTK's combined tree/list view where the list 
> > is displayed whenever you have child file objects, not directories? 
> > Whatever they do with xffm in the 4.1+ branch, tell them not to get rid 
> > of the status feedback message display. That's what makes it useful, 
> > particularly on long network operations.
> 
> Edscott, any comments here?

About fonts, in 4.1 the default is *not* to rescale fonts, instead just
use the font specified by the gtk theme. This didn't make it into the
4.0 series because of the translation freeze.

About GTK's combined tree/list view, I have no idea what that is about,
but I will look into it. A pointer to an example where the combined
tree/list view would be helpful.

About the diagnostics feedback, it can be turned off by means of an
environment variable or use of the xfce-mcs-manager. Also, 4.1 can be
set to verbose/nonverbose level. With the verbose level, for example,
you get the output of a "cp -v" in the diagnostics when you drag and
drop files. 

Currently the whole xffm code is being overhauled to optimise it into a
a better structured code.


Edscott