On 12/09/2015 04:58 PM, Doug Schaefer
wrote:
You bring up a great point about the Toolbar. It’s the most
obvious affect of the tragedy of the commons, and it’s why I’m
having a personal war against it. Do these buttons really need
to be in the face of the user all the time? How often are any of
these actually used versus the real estate they take up.
Wouldn’t it look better if we had fewer toolbar buttons but make
them a little bit larger to make them easier to understand for
new users? How do we make this better?
I've watched a newish Eclipse user (regular NetBeans users) taking
an Eclipse IDE JEE and installing JBoss Tools in it. Then seeing a
very crowded toolbar.
He wasn't very annoyed about the more-than-humanly-sortable numbers
of items in toolbar, he actually even told me that it was fine
because he expected that. And his immediate reaction was just to try
to hide some of those items. And that's where he felt a bad
experience: he didn't manage to find out how to hide toolbar
buttons. The first place he looked for was the right click on the
toolbar, and he was disappointed to not see the way to customize
toolbar there -I tracked this in
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=477670 and there's a
pending patch-, then he went into menus and didn't find anything
about toolbar. The right menu to choose was "Customize Perspective"
but it's really not something a newish user can guess.
So IMO, rather than debating on the content of the toolbar, things
on which all of us will never agree, it's more important to empower
the user in customizing it. Eclipse IDE already has this ability to
customize toolbar. Just making it more accessible might be enough
for at least this one user. Just having a fix
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=477670 would be a more
important progress for toolbar than brainstorming about what to keep
in/move out.
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