So over the weekend “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” Hylke Bons and I joined forces (just like during the GAJ days) to work more on the design of the Dash…
The gedit team gave some very good feedback till now, and I will be doing some work on Gedit soon
However back to the design and implementation work I am doing with Hylke…
- We moved the toolbar to be inside the tab, this is something the gedit guys are considering to have upstream so I will look into finishing it over the next week. Also for the sake of the Dash we removed the “New” button and “Open” button.
- Hylke came up with some nice modifications to the Dash itself… I think the snapshot says everything. We also added a “+” Tab.
There is still more to come so give us time and feel free to write comments. We 100% read them through
Seif, these gedit changes look great. I very much like the “+” tab to create a new document and how the dash seems so similar to something like the Chrome browser’s frequently-accessed websites feature.
Jim
Looks great!
I just had an idea when looking at the thumbnails in the second screenshot. I wonder if the copyright header in the source files can be skipped when generating the thumbnail. It’s the same in most source files one has in a project, not that interesting and unique.
1. If you move the ‘new’ button, then you are making this action less efficient.
If in the middle of my work I want to add a new file, I currently move the mouse to the easily accessible ‘new’ icon and click. With your system, I have to move the mouse and click in order to load the dash, and then move and click again to use the ‘new’ button.
Whilst having recent and frequent files available might be useful, there is no need to make other functions such as ‘new’ inefficient simply in order to make it look nice.
2. Yesterday, I edited 12 gnome-shell extensions. My dash today would have 36 file previews on it, 12 called extension.js, 12 called metadata.json, and 12 called stylesheet.css. The only difference between them being a miniature preview of the text which would be too small to reliably differentiate them and would rely entirely upon my memory of what was in each. More importantly, opening one of the metadata.json. for example, would not leave me in a position where its related files were any more accessible than when I started.
I use Gedit with the side panel open by default. When I load the program, it returns to the extensions directory on which I was working; it will display each of the directories (properly named) and, with a single click, I can open the directory and gain access to the correct set of files. All the related files will be displayed together, even if I didn’t open a particular stylesheet.css yesterday. This provides efficient and coherent access to file collections – the current proposal does not.
3. I also wrote two ‘todo’ notes and saved them in the appropriate directory of two completely unrelated programs. These should not appear in the Dash. They may be recent but, by definition, I don’t want to see them again until I get around to working on those projects – which may be many weeks from now.
In short, I really think that you should consider case-usage. Gedit is only used with any frequency by people who work with related files and for whom the hierachical file system is central to their work. The document-centric approach offered by the Dash and similar concepts is quite inappropriate to it. You would be better off simply adding ‘Recent’ and ‘Frequent’ files to the side panel as a meta-directory.
duncan pointed an important issue: buttons often used should have a predictable position, leaving the “New” on the toolbar makes it looks great, but there it can be hard to guess where it is.
For thumbnail generation, a “last seen” view could be generated when the document is closed.
I love the previews so far, and I’m looking forward to using this modern redesign of gedit. ^.^
I agree with the last two commenters, though, that New and Open should be in the same location. It’s quicker than clicking twice to start a new project, it avoids frustration for people expecting the buttons to be there, and it’s not like we’re hurting for space on the toolbar anyway.
Hey, many times one jumps from project to project and that will mess it up. Lets say I edited a bunch of files yesterday from project X but today, I really want to work on Y, it’s not cool to display all those files from project X that I’ve edited a lot recently when I really want to work on Y today.
I see you have there two views: one for “Recently used” and one for “Most used”. Well, since from an aesthetical and usability perspective you can only have 3 of those, make the third one be “From (project) Y”, where Y is the folder you have most files open at that given moment. If a person is not editing code that third view could be called “From Work Documents”
Wow. This is really clean. Moving the toolbar into the tabs really makes a difference. It made me rethink my earlier claim that this really should go into the gnome-shell.
Putting the Dash unter “untitled document 2″ seems strange. Would it perhaps make more sence to put it into the “+” tab directly and only opening a new tab after the selection is made?
I second what Duncan said – why would you remove the New and Open toolbar buttons? The dash looks cool and all that, but that’s no reason for removing something that’s actually important…
Very often when using gedit, I find that I’m working on a certain project, instead of unrelated files. Would it be possible to allow grouping these into a Project and showing those instead. Maybe even make it possible to name them to increase findability. Perhaps showing bits from two, three, or four files in the project as a visual guide would be useful then (maybe the first two tabs could be used for the selection within the project for this view?).
I guess the other way around is a valid use case too though, with the unrelated files, in which case your design would work quite beautifully.
Would it be possible to allow switching between these views (could very well be a setting under preferences, it doesn’t need to be in view all the time, since it’s mostly a one-time choice).
Gedit is one of my favorite tools on my desktop. This additions you are planning just blew my mind… I am so looking forward to adding a PPA with this to my new Oneiric setup
Thanks in advance for doing this and for caring about the great editor gedit is!
Whether you keep or delete New and Open from the toolbar is irrelevant for me as I use my keyboard for both actions. But adding the dash to every tab is just genius!
Looks great… To be honest, I would prefer without the + tab (which presumably opens a new document), maybe it could be optional? or maybe it would look nicer if it was aligned to the right ? It’s too close to the X.
PS: Love gedit, but would love it more if it knew that my .pp files are puppet. Since there is no syntax highlighting file for puppet, in the interim, it should at least highlight like ruby, which is what I force it to do for now.
Thanks!
James
This looks nice!
I was imagining something similar for Epiphany, having a “create new tab” tab, and showing a corresponding dash page, having “Recently visited” and “Bookmarks” sections.
You really don’t have to move the toolbar, instead, you have to move the tabbar:
http://ubuntuone.com/4JQUhLOZG8HaQth78fDkE4
Chrome does this, Firefox does this.
regards
This is starting to look really nice, Seif!
I think the mockup from Lorem is extremely informative, because it highlights how Gedit is often really used ie. with side-panel.
If I hit the ‘+’ tab, I have already told the program that I want a new file. I didn’t ask for a zeitgeist list of other files to chose from.
If I wanted to look at recent files, it would be more consistent if I could select a ‘recent files’ meta-directory in the side-panel.
The whole interface is taking on the feel of a (internet) browser. So your side-panel should be able to flip between files (= bookmarks) and history (=recent files). You could even add the feature of dragging a tab to a position in the file hierarchy in order to save it in the appropriate group without having to go through an additional save-file dialog.
However, if you follow this line of development, you might be advised to head over to the Mozilla UX team’s site. There are numerous and mutually exclusive variations on the possible way to implement this approach, each with pros and cons for different usage cases, and each of which has been very carefully studied both theoretically and empirically. No point in re-inventing the wheel.
Good Luck!
p.s. Having just re-read my last entry, it occurs to me that if you treat the side-panel more like a firefox bookmark system, you could offer the ability to add meta-directories into which the user could add links to any number of files, thus providing a named project facility as discussed in many of the comment above.
Just an idea.
While your in the habit of introducing some of my favourite browser’s features to my favourite text editor, how about adding another one — the ability to switch tabs with the scroll wheel?
I’m really sad to see this feature removed from gtk, but chrome still has it thank god. But not gedit. Sad face.
Another is middle clicking to close tabs. Pretty please?
While I actually like the feature of a dash tab and a ‘+’-tab to make the creation of a new document easier I nevertheless have to raise some doubts:
1) I would prefer the toolbar keeping its place. Not only because I am old and don’t want to learn new tricks but also because I think that not all of the toolbar’s functions are related to a single document. Therefore they shouldn’t occur inside an area which is associated with a single document. Moreover – what happens to the toolbar if I close all document tabs?
2) The dash tab’s title shouldn’t be “Untitled document #n”. I would expect something like ‘Start Page’ or ‘Welcome Page’. That would clearly communicate to the user that this tab plays a special role.
3) It would be nice if the user could configure whether the user gets the dash page by default when he starts gedit – or if there is a menu entry (e.g. under the “Views” menu) where he could toggle the dash page’s visibility. Other editors (e.g. the Komodo Editor) offer this feature.
Hey, Seif! I really appreciate the effort you and Hylke are putting on Gedit! Thank you!
In the meanwhile, I found two links that might be interesting for you both on this task.
http://jboriss.wordpress.com/tag/new-tab-page/
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2011/06/10/home-tab-and-new-tab-conceptual-mockups/
I like the Chrome-style tabs, but for sake of consistency, would it be possible to actually use the Chrome tab widget? If not, a I think softer/lighter ‘x’ icons might look better. Also, how about an additional category (besides ‘Recently used’ and ‘Most used’) called ‘Versions’ that would appear automatically when multiple versions of the same file are detected (by user-configurable similarity threshold). Extra cool: show diff with oldest version in each new version in thumbnail.
Here’s some more ideas:
- For the regular thumbnails, focus preview area on segment of text most recently modified.
- A simple (Time Machine) versioning system directly integrated in Gedit
that’s simply beautiful.
blank state help is a great initiative.
good work
You know, making gEdit look like a web browser really doesn’t help workflow.
How about a ‘project’ mechanism that lets us flip between groups of related files? That would be more useful than giant thumbnails of text.
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