Hi all,
for me the buttons like the new dimension button do not seem to open their submenus. Is this some known issue with an easy fix? Did i potentially turn off something important (it worked yesterday and i did not do an update but now it is broken)?
Is it simple user error (what action would open the submenu, i would have assumed hovering over the button would do it but well …)?
For buttons with the little triangle on them, either click and hold until the full palette comes out, or click and drag to do the same.
Thanks. A bit unintuitive but well what do i know.
We surveyed other programs that we were familiar with that had this kind of paradigm of fly-out buttons, and we found that some used the long-press and some used the swipe, so we implemented both. I don’t think the concept of just hovering to open came up – is there much software that uses that paradigm?
I don’t think I have seen ones that are hover before, and I would be afraid it would then conflict with the tool tip display - since that is activated by just hovering over the toolbar item.
Probably not, I don’t remember any.
The Qt toolkit has a dropdown tool button but it has a clear marker, it’s just like a combo box with a dropdown arrow so it’s clearly visible. LibreOffice uses that kind of button, too, so the concept isn’t rare.
I know such buttons only from tools like librecad and catia. For both of them the button just opens the submenu, it itself does not do any action. (In catia double click then fixes the tool similar to how tools anyway work in kicad)
Long click or drag click are for me connected to touch interfaces. For some reason i immediately try this on smartphone apps if i can not get the action i want but not when using the mouse.
And yes i also tried to click the small arrow in the corner as it kind of seems like the “click here to expand” button. The hover to open stuff is how such menus on websites work which might be why i kind of assumed this could be how it works in kicad (and as i got it to open once my brain somehow thought this was how it worked).
I personally kind of like the way freecad does it. There buttons themselves do not have submenus. But the interface is dynamic and if a set of buttons does not fit then the remaining buttons are behind a thin arrow shaped button. (Catia also does the same but in addition to having buttons with submenus)
Sidenote: we are also slowly running out of hotkey options (i needed to find hotkeys for the dimensioning tools and now no longer have one for duplicate).
Maybe chained hotkeys like used for visual studio (example ctrl+k->ctrl+u for “format docuement”) or a command interface like the one of librecad or even the ctrl+shift+p style interface of sublime/vscode could help here (blender also had a nice command interface when i used it years ago but i do not know how it works today).
Of these i think the chained hotkeys are best suited to be used with one hand (allowing the other to stay on the mouse).
In LibreOffice there are two kinds of those icon+downarrow buttons: those which have a normal button function + the dropdown function, and those whic have only dropdown function. You can see the difference (at least with some theme or platform) when hovering over the button: it either shows a line between the icon and the arrow, or not. Intuitive? I don’t know. Also, the modern minimal flat button style doesn’t help at all.
lo-2021-05-18_10.52.04
EDIT: add to that the combinations of toggle state/normal function…
A nostalgia quiz: does anyone know what is “Ctrl+x Ctrl+s”?
Right!
Ideally custom python scripts could be attached to hotkeys and called from “command palette”.
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