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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#551

Post by armagon »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #386
Flow wrote: post #270

I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something. Whenever I see a hamburger menu I s…

> Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The arguably worst offender in MacOS these days is the emoji picker. Press ctrl+cm…

Huh. I didn't know this existed.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#552

Post by klibertp »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #375
Derbasti wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. On Windows, the first…

> That's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do. Although I agree this is annoying, to be completely fair, it doesn't suggest that you should start typing your password immediately. You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to. A…

> Arguably, you have been 'taught' or you have inferred yourself that you should expect a sleeping system to immediately accept your keypresses as a password, which although reasonable is not necessarily a good practice.

I fail to see why that wouldn't be a "good practice". Last weekend I read some articles on Canon Cat[1], and Jef Raskin referred[2] to the feature as something desirable:

> In many ways it was, for 1987, far ahead. [...] instant on with any keystroke (and you didn't even lose the keystroke)

He goes on to explain why it's a good idea to do so in the article, it's a good read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

[2] https://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#553

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

andai wrote: post #530
fxtentacle wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one of the main reasons why I switched from XCode to CLion. XCode lost keystrokes, which drove me crazy. The other thing was that I could reliably type faster than XCode could display the letters, which made me feel like I'm drunk. CLion seems to be quite excellent at recording and replaying everything, including stuff I type while the auto-completion is loading. Plus it has a really fast key to screen loop.

JetBrains did a lot of work to reduce typing latency of their IDEs: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-la... As an aside, I find it amusing that more latency is introduced by a USB keyboard than existed in an entire 80's computer (from keypress to rendering on screen). See also: Carmack's rant about how it takes longer to put a pixel on the screen than ping across the Atlantic.

>As an aside, I find it amusing that more latency is introduced by a USB keyboard than existed in an entire 80's computer

Uh what?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#554

Post by bfrog »

I really like adawaita as well, I’m sad to see the easily visible buttons are disappearing into flatland.

I agree with the author, the flat look shown here is missing at the very least some outlines on buttons. Hidden UI elements seem like an awful idea.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#555

Post by thesuitonym »

rezonant wrote: post #299
eqvinox wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.

Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File". Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think…

This is a problem of poor app design, not the stunning indictment of traditional menus that you seem to think it is.

A poor menu layout can be fixed. A hamburger menu will always be a byzantine mix of everything because everything has to be in there. There is no organization, except flyout menus--which were a problem with traditional menu designs, but you could organize without them.

Hell, some applications have just moved the traditional menu behind the hamburger. Why? Because that was a good way to organize operations, even if it wasn't perfect, or wasn't always perfectly implemented.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#556

Post by account42 »

hedora wrote: post #195
jchw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s going to be a bloody mess for a long time, because the choices for how to handle resolution independence are all inherently filled with compromise. With font rendering, I think there is hope. Horizontal subpixel positioning with vertical hinting seems like a good tradeoff to me. Grid fitting vertically is not too jarring, and grid fitting horizontally to subpixels instead of pixels looks pretty good too, on low…

I really don't understand what was wrong with the X11 approach. I had a high DPI monitor in 2001. I typed the DPI into /etc/XFree86.conf or whatever, and it all Just Worked (TM). Edit: I think modern web browsers implement ctrl-+ and ctrl-- the same way, except X11 apps kept separate directories of icons rendered for different DPIs, because 1GHz single core still seemed luxurious. Web browsers scale the bitmaps using…

> I think modern web browsers implement ctrl-+ and ctrl-- the same way, except X11 apps kept separate directories of icons rendered for different DPIs, because 1GHz single core still seemed luxurious. Web browsers scale the bitmaps using some reasonable algorithm. Other than that, arbitrary zooms work with zero blur.

Web browsers scale bitmats if no other version is available but you can provide different bitmaps for different pixel ratios to avoid any blurryness [0]. Resolution independence is one thing that the modern web stack gets right - even 1-pixel borders/lines and space between elements generally works as expected for different scales.

Of couse *mobile* browsers made the IMO stupid decision of only activating these scaling features when you add a special tag to your HTML header.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimed...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#557

Post by qalmakka »

bmn__ wrote: post #469
qalmakka wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because there's no Breeze theme for Qt 6, so it's using the builtin Fusion theme which is literal cow dung. If you port your theme to Qt 6, the app should look identical.

I do not use a theme. I think you have it the wrong way around. What's missing here is the Qt6 equivalent of KDE System Settings → Appearance, or configuration tool http://qt5ct.sf.net >, and it's not my task as the end user to provide these, but the toolkit and desktop environment developers'.

You always use a theme with Qt or Gtk. On Plasma the default Qt and Gtk theme is Breeze, which has not been ported to Qt6 yet. ATM the only Qt Widgets-compatible themes I have on my system are "Fusion" and "Windows" (as in "Windows 95"), both of which look absolutely horrible. Fusion is the default, and it's what you currently see when you open a Qt 6 Widgets app (for instance, QBittorrent right now).

By the way, qt6ct exists https://github.com/trialuser02/qt6ct>, and it's even in Arch's repositories right now. The main issue is that it's useless, because there are simply no Qt6 themes out there yet and KDE still does not support Qt6 so you have to force qt6ct manually.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#558

Post by [deleted] »

jcelerier wrote: post #473
jchw wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is entirely untrue. Did you even try ? Qt even at version 6 still supports rendering through X11 commands, and afaik does that by default when ssh'ing on Debian distros. When you connect over SSH, it will fail to setup XShm and then it will work as expected, only slower than the speed of smell, because now it’s shipping pixmaps over the network. Not all X11 clients continue to work properly if XShm can’t be es…

> When you connect over SSH, it will fail to setup XShm and then it will work as expected, only slower than the speed of smell, because now it’s shipping pixmaps over the network. no, this is false . Here's a video of dolphin, KDE's Qt 5 file manager, run over ssh on another computer: does that look like it's blitting pixmaps over the network ? https://www.veed.io/view/d822f1b3-305a-4af1-8df6-61439515ccc... When chec…

[deleted]

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#559

Post by danachow »

johnqian wrote: post #264

I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design. I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average. But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user fr…

> iOS is mostly flat

It’s less flat today then it was - because they’re clearly backpedaling.

> There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs

Apple ripped off flat design from Microsoft.

> Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things.

Last I checked, some texture on UI elements didn’t take any additional space.

Your arguments are entirely unconvincing.

Blurred background effects are nothing new - and that’s something that’s been done with GPUs from nearly 20 years ago. They haven’t been able to make it anything more than a fad.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#560

Post by aidenn0 »

linmob wrote: post #279
aidenn0 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this was running under Plasma Mobile

The Plasma Mobile Maliit keyboard works with GTK apps on Manjaro Plasma Mobile. There must be some way to make this work on other Plasma Mobile distributions.

I'll try Manjaro then; it definitely doesn't work on an up-to-date postmarketOS on a (non-pro) pinephone.

[edit]

Can confirm keyboard works in FF on Manjaro, but it has other jankiness (e.g. it seems to think it is much wider than the screen).

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