Toasts are bad UX

I agree they do a good job, but I think a toast without undo could also work there. Apply the UI eagerly, toast success or failure. As it is, I assume on failure it becomes an 'X' and shows an error? I just dont generally like very short transitions like the spinner is currently. In general, coming from app land, I prefer a deferred loading spinner that only shows if the action takes X ms. So in the happy path of a fast action the user never sees the loading state.

Let me share the dark side of Toasts.

World of Warcraft has these, they're used for lots of things. Notably achievements and things like that. There's also add on that look for rare monsters and pop up when it detects one while you're flying about in the land, loot drop announcements

However, we just went through a special event called "Remix" which basically offered degenerate gameplay. Absurdly powerful characters, loot raining from the sky. And in this event, the common reward was a chest filled with gear and other things. These chests came from everywhere.

When you opened a chest, if it had piece of gear, you'd get a little toast.

Now, when you're boucing about collecting boar livers and rousting out hoodlums from their huts, it was quite easy to collect dozens of these things.

And, being WoW players, not known for their patience, you simply collect them all and open them all at once. Open your bags, and right click away. From this, your UI simply explodes with toasts. And they're all queued up, you can only see so many at a time, like, perhaps, 5. And they slowly fade, making room for others.

They dominate roughly 30% of the screen real estate (when presented in volume), smack in the center. And you can either wait it out (which takes a long time), or madly right click to dismiss them all. Me, I would simply go to the inn, open them all up, and log out (which is instant in an inn), and log back in. That would flush the queue of toasts.

Similarly, if you log into a zone, particularly a quiet zone, it's not uncommon for the screen to explode with alerts telling you of all the rare monsters that are simply sitting there because the zone is very quiet for players.

Finally, there a grouping queue you can join for group content, and you can queue for more than one event at a time. So, it's not uncommon to finish one event, kill the boss, the screen explodes with your loot, others loots, maybe a boss achievement, followed by a booming horn with a dialog telling you your new event is ready for you. The entire UI is just a cacophony of alerts.

Toast are mostly fine in my experience, but they do not work when applied in volume.

> In this specific example you do have an Undo button: the checkbox itself.

That's false. The checkbox itself is not a viable undo button under any circumstances in this specific example (i.e., you accidentally clicked but have no idea where, and let's assume you have no idea of that particular checkbox's state prior to the accident). Any adjacent checkbox would have extremely similar plausibility for a user wondering how to undo.

That said, toast is not great either, because it may disappear before the user fully recovers from their accident (say, a spilled drink). Maybe the undo button (and any async success/error labeling for the original event) ought to be adjacent to the checkbox and persist until the next action taken.

As long as the "toast" section is reused for many different messages, I don't get the problem? Ideally, you'd embrace that there is a common spot to see informational items. Even more ideally, you'd have a way to view all of the notifications that have been shown. (Emacs user entering the conversation...)

I confess I was completely at a loss as to what a Toast was, though. I suppose we went with that name because they pop up?

Seems like it could live among these:

> We currently demand that users internalize several metaphors when interacting with Homebrew. These include:

> Formula (how to build a bit of software)

> Bottle (pre-built software)

> Cask (pre-built software on macOS)

> Tap (a collection of software)

> Keg (where software installs itself)

> Cellar (where all my software install themselves)

> As well as an additional number of less-common metaphors that contributors and maintainers need to know, like Rack, Tab, and Formulary.

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/10798