On Feb 10, 2013, at 6:24 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 6:17 AM, Jon Cruz wrote:
Would anybody miss the 'Text and Font' dialog now that we have the style selector in the 'Text' tool toolbar? I started the process of updating the 'Text and Font' dialog to match the Text toolbar but I have discovered that it is going to take quite a bit of work. For example the dialog font selector cannot handle font-family lists, nor does it have an entry box for typing in the name of a font. Both the toolbar and the dialog do mostly the same things but in quite different ways. If we keep the dialog, a helper class should probably be written that encapsulates the common functionality.
I believe that in the abstract we will have need of both the toolbar and a dialog.
Even if we get on-canvas spellchecking?
Yes, even then.
One thing we should keep in mind is that different people work from different mental models. One main example of this is contrasting the people who write down a list of turns when taking directions vs. those who draw out a map.
Another use case might be if someone has the text/font dialog detached and floating. Given that we'd have context-sensitive toolbars, some people like to keep more visible by leveraging a floating palette/dialog. In the past I've even worked with someone who hit the limit on simultaneous open windows/buffers in one of the updates to emacs. Just because my brain doesn't happen to work that way does not always mean nobody else's brain does.
One point we want to be sure to avoid is the GNOME-type oversimplification where they've confused eliminating options as the same as making a UI easier to use. We might call that "simpler vs. simplistic". With a simpler UI it is easier to get things done, but with a simplistic UI one gets blocked from doing advanced things.