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Build ID: M20060629-1905 Steps To Reproduce: Try to read the title text of one of your complete tasks in the "Task List". More information: It make sense to have it light grey and striked during normal circumstances; however when trying to copy the context from a completed task, this is a real nuisance and significantly increases the time required to find the correct task. It would be great if the text of completed tasks would change back to black on white with no strike though while the user has their mouse over it. Currently I often find myself changing the tasks back to Incomplete just so I can read it. P.S. Love Mylar, great work!
One for you Mik...
Gerry: could you please attach a screenshot of this? I find completed tasks easy enough to read, but this probably has to do with my screen font.
I also think that striketrough is hard to read in both Task List and the Search views. Mik, can you please make it configurable trough Appearance / Colors and Fonts. So, it would be possible to change color and font style (i.e. disable striketrough).
I'm not sure that I can make it optional via themes, because we have to create this font in code, but this may be possible, or we can create a custom preference. Also, it would still be helpful for me to see a screenshot so that I get a sense of the problematic font, since we are using it as default.
Created attachment 57277 [details] striketrough look Mik, you can probably create a dummy font in appearance preferences and then copy its styles to the programmatically created font. Anyways, here is the screenshot of striketrough in Task List and Search views.
Sorry Mik, haven't checked back on this in a while. I'll get you a screenshot when I get into work in the morning. However I think by it's very nature it is supposed to be hard to read so they don't take away focus from the pending tasks. Any text which is light grey on a white background and striked-though is going to be harder to read than plain black text on white. Now that I think of it, what would be even better than my original suggestion would be a toggle button to turn the completed task dulling on and off.
Gerry, you've convinced me that a large part of our problem is the fact that the strikethrough font is too light. I took a look at the Outlook 2003 and 2007 UI and their strikeghtough fonts look identical, except that they're darker. So what I've done for now is to make the default color darker, and also added this color to our theme settings so that it can be configured by the user. The reason that I'm shying away from making this a preference is that creating preferences often means that the root problem gets neglected (e.g. font was too light). However, I'm going to leave this open in case anyone still finds the font unreadable to the point that they want to disable it. A note of caution though: I worked with Mylar for at least a year before it had the strikethrough, and it makes the problem was that it takes a lot more effort to identify which tasks are completed and which aren't, even though we have the icon overlay.
Mik, I still would prefer to be able to disable striketrough. Sorry, but it just too many horizontal lines. It would be fine if you could striketrough just a bug id, but text should be readable.
Created attachment 58076 [details] Very hard to read text See attachment for my screenshot. I'm not sure how well Eugene's idea would work in practice, it could be a good part solution to the problem, but there would still need to be some sort of dulling of the text so that it doesn't overwhelm the user, so the toggle button would still be needed for when you have to read though closed bugs.
Eugene: if you can give me a snippet for making the strikethrough go through just the ID I could try that. For local tasks it would probably have to go through the whole task though.
Strike my previous comment. I am now much more interested to get rid of those striketroughs, especially on search results. Besides, I don't think tree widget allows to decorate part of text label without getting into custom drawing.
The strikethrough is a very visible thing but this bug report has been the only case where this has been brought up. So I'm not yet sure if it is worth adding an option for this. The tooltips help, but I do realize that in the Search view (or another part of the UI that could be geared towards showing completed stuff) the current thing is suboptimal. But for the Task List my understanding of user feedback is that it is still best. Eugene: you could consider adding preference to the Sandbox for this. I think I'll create another Sandbox feature called "Experimental UI" or "UI Tweaks" where this kind of stuff makes sense to try out.
(In reply to comment #12) > But for the Task List my understanding of user feedback is that it is still best. That is not what I read from Gerry's comments. I may live with striketrough showing on tasks with guaranteed visibility, but when using quickfind it is rather interfering then useful. > Eugene: you could consider adding preference to the Sandbox for this. I think > I'll create another Sandbox feature called "Experimental UI" or "UI Tweaks" > where this kind of stuff makes sense to try out. That would be better then nothing.
BTW, the suggested setting should be in General / Appearance / Colors and Fonts, but the code still have to be in the task.ui. So, I am not sure if it does make sense for sandbox here.
(In reply to comment #14) > BTW, the suggested setting should be in General / Appearance / Colors and Fonts, > but the code still have to be in the task.ui. So, I am not sure if it does make > sense for sandbox here. I don't see how we can make strikethrough work via Colors and Fonts, so if that's possible please suggest an implementation approach. Other than that I think that putting it in the Sandbox is the best approach for now.
Created attachment 86499 [details] standard settings for strikeout font styles Mik, strikeout is actually a standard font style. So, all you need to do is to allow to configure font for hyperlinks like that under Appearance preferences
Unfortunately that won't work on Linux.
(In reply to comment #17) > Unfortunately that won't work on Linux. Which is fine because there is no strikeout on Linux anyways, isn't it? So far strikeout been pushed out into all Windows users and there is no option to turn it off for Task List and Search results and now it is siggested for the Task Editor. Note that on small fonts, numbers 3, 6, 8, 9, 0 look very alike when stricken out and it require additional effort to read them.
Yes, that configuration option will work well for the task list. It won't work for the recently changed hyperlinks (bug 191726) though which do not use a font style to render the strike through but custom drawing. We would need some type of additional preference for these hyperlinks (at least for Linux).
Steffen, can you please attach screenshot of font chooser dialog from Linux? There is also a hack that one could use a IThemePreview that would provide UI to change strikeout for selected fond data and accordingly update FontData. I've done some digging and couldn't find API to store custom configuration under themes. There is a read-only API that allows to get arbitrary key/value pairs, but there is no editing capability for that. So the options are: - request Platform to provide fond chooser that would have strikeout option - use a hack based on IThemePreview - use proprietary setting configurable trough custom UI
Created attachment 86513 [details] Font chooser on GTK
(In reply to comment #16) > Mik, strikeout is actually a standard font style. So, all you need to do is to > allow to configure font for hyperlinks like that under Appearance preferences Last time I checked I couldn't make this approach work for a viewer, hence the reflective approach to setting strikethrough used in TaskListColorsAndFonts (see Platform bug 124551). However, I just did another quick check and I was able to make strikethrough work as the style for view tabs, so perhaps this is now possible. If we could make this part of the theme that would be great, so patch that shows this is welcome. Leo: could you check if you can set a view tab to have a strikethrough font on Mac? If so, and if the vifewer font can be themed, we could justify some 2.3/3.0 time on this in order to get strikethrough working on Mac.
On Mac OS it's possible to select strike through in the font chooser dialog but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I'm fine with making the font for completed tasks part of the theme. I can implement a Sandbox tweak for non-Windows systems to explicitly activate strike-through for those using some type of rendering hack like in TaskListHyperlink.
As Steffen's pointed out, playing with strikethrough in the Eclipse font preferences didn't have any effect.
(In reply to comment #22) > Last time I checked I couldn't make this approach work for a viewer, Before sending my previous comment I verified to enable strikeout on for the "Task Editor - Notes and Comments" in the Appearance settings using Eclipse UI and it worked just fine. If you decided to use theme settings, we'll need to introduce separate font configuration for completed tasks. Then it would be possible to use that font when rendering hyperlinks on windows. I can look at the patch for that or I can look at the patch that would use proprietary setting and sandbox UI.
Created attachment 86521 [details] striketrough in the task editor (In reply to comment #24) > As Steffen's pointed out, playing with strikethrough in the Eclipse font > preferences didn't have any effect. Ugh. On what platform?
On Mac OS X. I should have been clearer.
Created attachment 86522 [details] styled text example By the way, can you try this little app on linux and mac? It is using StyledText, which is practically the same as TextViewer or SourceViewer that I've been suggesting so this soultion should be more portable in regards to strikeout, hyperlinks and other text decoration.
Created attachment 86526 [details] sample tool on GTK All font styles seem to work with the sample tool on Linux :).
Good to see progress on this, I would love to see this strikethrough style (or lack thereof) be consistent across platforms. Note that afaik strikethroughs always rendered in StyledText and the like, but when I first did this I could not get them to rendered within tree and table viewers without use of win32 natives (bug 124551). But the fact that they render in the view tabs is promising.
(In reply to comment #30) > ...render in the view tabs... Mik, you referred to this few times before. Can you please clarify what did you meant by that?
It's a font setting under Colors and Fonts: View and Editor Folders > Part Title Font.
I see, but aren't those are custom tabs? If so, what does it prove?
(In reply to comment #33) > I see, but aren't those are custom tabs? If so, what does it prove? As per comment#22, unfortunately it does not prove anything. I said perhaps it's now possible if tabs use any underlying native widget or label, but I'm not sure how likely it is that they do. So unless someone can demonstrate that strikethrough style can be used in a viewer, we are back to where we were with the custom win32 code. If that's the case, I suggest the following: 1) We custom draw the strikethrough on non-win32 platforms 2) We make the use of strikethrough a Mylyn preference If we don't do (1) I would like to do (2) in the Sandbox in order to avoid adding another preference, since use of strikethrough is not uncommon on Windows. If we do (1) I think that we will probably need to make it a Task List preference because other platforms strikethrough is not as common. In general I'm strongly in favor of (1) because this lack of consistency between platforms has always pained me, and because strikethrough provides an instant visual cue on whether a task is complete (whereas a gray foreground color is a more subtle cue). Thoughts?
*** Bug 217619 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #34) > ... since use of strikethrough is not uncommon on Windows. Mik, do you have examples of windows apps other then Ms Outlook that make heavy use of the striketrough? Anyways, it would be really great to have a preference that would allow to disable striketrough decoration. It also might be a good idea to review decoration strategy used for completed tasks, i.e. consider some alternatives, for example use "checkbox" icon decoration for completed tasks (it would also allow to use something like question mark icon when task completion status is unknown).
Frank: are you interested in trying to apply your strikethrough line drawing to the Task List view (as per comment#34)? The right place to do it would likely be CustomTaskListDecorationDrawer. You'll note that we have some platform-specific code in there, but you could just make it work for one platform and we would tweak it for the others if needed. If the platform you work on is Windows you'd first want to disable the native strikethrough code in TaskListColorsAndFonts (see attached context).
Created attachment 90020 [details] mylyn/context/zip
(In reply to comment #37) > Frank: are you interested in trying to apply your strikethrough line drawing to > the Task List view (as per comment#34)? The right place to do it would likely > be CustomTaskListDecorationDrawer. You'll note that we have some > platform-specific code in there, but you could just make it work for one > platform and we would tweak it for the others if needed. If the platform you > work on is Windows you'd first want to disable the native strikethrough code in > TaskListColorsAndFonts (see attached context). Yes I can try to start next weekend. By envrioment is Mac OS X and with VMWare I can run Win XP so I hope that I can test both cases.
Created attachment 90529 [details] Patch This Patch was test on a MacBook Pro. I removed the platform-specific code for the tasklist. Now that we have that patch we can define a special Color for the strikethrough line and change the Foreground Color. Thoughts?
Created attachment 90530 [details] mylyn/context/zip
Rob: please review.
Need to defer: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn/3.0_Plan#Deferred_Items
I'll take a look at the patch.
Frank, I get conflicts when I try to apply the patch. Sorry for letting it go stale. Would you have time to recreate it against head? If not, I'll look into it next week.
Created attachment 113215 [details] updated patch Sorry during creation of this patch I found that here is only on part of the patch. ToDo: - make strikethrough font optional Sorry I did not implement this until now. I hope that I can do this tomorrow evening. Is this OK? If not feel free to implement the missing part.
Created attachment 113219 [details] updated patch Sorry during creation of this patch I found that here is only on part of the patch. ToDo: - make strikethrough font optional Sorry I did not implement this until now. I hope that I can do this tomorrow evening. Is this OK? If not feel free to implement the missing part.
Created attachment 113220 [details] mylyn/context/zip
No hurry, I'll wait for the final patch.
Created attachment 113405 [details] complete Implementation Hope that this is that what you need.
Created attachment 113406 [details] mylyn/context/zip
The patch works really well on Linux! I'll do some more testing and apply if I don't run into any problems. I wonder if we should keep using the strikethrough style on Windows or if it's better to have a consistent implementation that does not rely on internals and works on all platforms?
I have applied the patch with minor modifications. The custom drawing code for the task list is only used on non-Windows platforms to keep strikethrough in dialogs that use the TaskElementLabelProvider on Windows. Since there has been little interest in making this a preference I have moved the setting to disable strikethrough to the preference page of the UI experiments feature.
