6 ms·

Wow, that Gedit transition looks awful. I'm curious what the motivation was for these 'client-side decorations' you speak of.

by zatkin 12y ago

ronjouch 12y ago
1. What do you consider "awful" (or, OP, a "horror") in this transition? (This is a real question, not a rhetorical one.) CSD are one of the better recent GNOME UX trends, I think, for the reasons below which feel well executed to me. 2. Motivations are (to my understanding) to save vertical space, reduce window clutter, and put common actions at the forefront. Matthias Clasen talks about it in great detail at [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decorations-continued/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decor... [2] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-side-decorations/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-... [3] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-12/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-...
- lottin 12y ago
  The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Sure they've saved some vertical space but in doing so they've also made the UI a whole lot less efficient to use. There's also more clutter, not less, with all sorts of unrelated controls crammed into one tiny space.
  - vog 12y ago
    Why not simply use shortcut keys? These are more efficient than having to grab to the mouse, especially on an editor, on which most the the time both your hand are at the keyboard anyway.
    - lottin 12y ago
      Yes but here we're talking about a graphical user interface and the whole purpose of a GUI is to let you do things by interacting with graphical elements.
      - vog 12y ago
        Then, I don't understand the criticism about efficiency for regular users, as this is – for text editors – also clearly out of scope for graphical user interfaces. (Of course, the story is different for the graphical domain such as Blender).
  - ronjouch 12y ago
    > The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Agreed on that point. The Office team made a wonderful job at this, by also putting actions in the title bar (e.g. by default: save, undo, redo), but making it configurable. However, MS has orders of magnitude more dollars to develop/support/bugfix the added complexity, and given the hate of GNOME committers regarding anything configurable, I doubt that will ever happen in GNOME. I'm not bothered by it because, like others here, I use keyboard shortcuts for 99% of my actions and never need to reach for buttons or the sandwich menu, but I understand why I'd be bothered too if it wasn't the case.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  XFCE is for people who like old GUI-design, so of course such users are going to get annoyed when modern GUI design starts to creep in. How anyone could consider the first screenshot of gedit prettier than the second is beyond me, but that is probably why I'm on OSX and not XFCE.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    I'm really interested in your use of the words 'modern' and 'old' in the above post. The human perceptual system does not change much from millennium to millennium and that our understanding of how that system works becomes richer over decades. Can you explain how one set of afordances can be considered more modern than another? I'm not being snarky, I'd really like to understand your idea of modern/old in this context.
    - heinrich5991 12y ago
      He probably means the word just in the sense that e.g. Wiktionary defines: Pertaining to a current or recent time and style; not ancient.[1] [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/modern#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/modern#Adjective EDIT: And by old, he probably means "old-style".
      - keithpeter 12y ago
        So XFCE 4.12 is a modern UI according to your definition, having just been released.
        wodenokoto 12y ago
        Now you are being snarky.
        keithpeter 12y ago
        Well perhaps I'll confess to a little licence with this last reply. I really find use of the M word strange in relation to UIs. The whole idea of a GUI is, what, 40 years old?
- anon4 12y ago
  One thing I'll always miss with CSD is window snapping. Now it's shadow-snapping.
- byuu 12y ago
  First; I have a nice, long titlebar strip with left-aligned titles like I like. I can click anywhere in there and move my windows around (I know about alt+click, but I don't want to use my keyboard to move a window, and that doesn't work on my other OSes anyway.) Second; I like having a choice in how my window decorations work. I can run Clearlooks-Phenix, or Aguelemon, or Be, or Crux, or whatever else I like. Some of the themes have window borders on the sides (which I like), some don't. With CSD, my only option is a poor OS X imitation theme. No edges to the sides of windows (awful ... I can spare 4px so that my window doesn't blend into my desktop, and so I can grip for window resizes easier, thanks), no control over titlebar text placement (I don't want to scan to the middle of the title bar to read the title. The left is a consistent location.) Some of these WMs have special features like middle-click the maximize button to maximize it horizontally, nicer snap-to-window and snap-to-edge functionality, etc. Third; I want my title bars free of clutter. The title bar is for the title of the window, and for moving it, and at most you'd have the minimize/maximize/close buttons on a corner. I've been using windows the same way since Windows 3.1; so about 23 years now. You may scream Luddite, but I say that if it's not broken, don't fix it. With CSDs, now I have to dodge all of these ridiculous controls like "Open", "New Tab", "Save" and "Hamburger" when I want to move a window. And all of those further reduce the available space for a title. So I guess I can forget about showing the full filepath for my files open in gedit. Fourth; and this is a big one; consistency (eg discoverability.) All of my Xfce windows look the same, act the same, work the same. I have a title bar, a menu with all of my features, and usually an optional toolbar with all of the major features. Now with these CSDs, every single window looks entirely different. To get to menu commands, I have the added step of clicking on the hamburger first, which has a miniscule hit window. And that's assuming everyone designing these awful CSDs uses the same hamburger icon and placement. Again, we go from something we've been using for 23 years to "the trend of the week design." Because newer must mean better, right? CSDs are basically what you get on Windows with every OS driver installation GUI. I do not want that for my desktop at all. There's a reason this has all mostly stayed consistent since GUIs became a thing. It's not because people were lazy, unimaginative, not aware of design guidelines, or anything like that: it's because it works. And it works really, really well. A lot of us are simply tired of relearning how to use our computers every time a "modern" designer gets a hair up his ass and decides that we need to radically change all the things! The ribbons, the Metros, the CSDs, etc. So in four years, while I stick with my tried and true approach, Gnome 4 will have undoubtedly moved on to an even newer idea for how to design windows, and you'll be explaining to others why Gnome 3's CSD approach was flawed compared to $newTrendyDesign. And while you're learning to get used to where all of your operations have moved to, I'll be over here getting work done instead. > Motivations are (to my understanding) to save vertical space Even when I was stuck on 1024x768 CRTs back in the '90s, I can't say I've ever thought to myself, "if only I had an extra 10px of vertical screen space, my user experience would be vastly improved." The idea of crushing everything into this hot mess to save the same on my 2560x1600 panel (let alone 4K/8K panels) is just asinine. The only time I've ever had issues with the titlebar taking up space was during the 640x480 fallback VGA modes when installing my video card drivers. Besides, isn't the trend lately (even in Gnome) to add ridiculous amounts of excessive padding to everything, for the sake of all twelve touch screen desktop users? > reduce window clutter That window looks a lot more cluttered to me. I do turn off the toolbar (and status bar for that matter) on gedit 2, and I can turn off the menu (with an addon), and use keyboard shortcuts for my actions. I have no control over this CSD, whose height is twice that of a plain titlebar anyway (to accommodate button heights.) > and put common actions at the forefront The toolbar does the same thing, and common actions goes from 3 to 13 common actions in this case (with room to spare on the latter.) Even better, the toolbar is completely optional. For all but the three common actions, it is now harder to do things with the new gedit. And terrifyingly, one of those now-harder actions is "move the window."
dimsuz 12y ago
It looks awful with Xfce default theme. Gedit = Gnome Edit (I guess) - and it looks well and integrated really well when used in GNOME environment (gnome-shell). So its not fair to judge it this way. Try to open some Xfce apps in GNOME and it will look like horror too (compared to gnome ones) :)
digi_owl 12y ago
Design wankery under the banner of "usability" most likely. The whole Gnome/systemd/fedora sphere seems to have a severe case of OSX envy.

Wow, that Gedit transition looks awful. I'm curious what the motivation was for these 'client-side decorations' you speak of.

by zatkin 12y ago

Wow, that Gedit transition looks awful. I'm curious what the motivation was for these 'client-side decorations' you speak of.

ronjouch 12y ago

1. What do you consider "awful" (or, OP, a "horror") in this transition? (This is a real question, not a rhetorical one.) CSD are one of the better recent GNOME UX trends, I think, for the reasons below which feel well executed to me. 2. Motivations are (to my understanding) to save vertical space, reduce window clutter, and put common actions at the forefront. Matthias Clasen talks about it in great detail at [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decorations-continued/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decor... [2] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-side-decorations/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-... [3] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-12/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-...

lottin 12y ago
The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Sure they've saved some vertical space but in doing so they've also made the UI a whole lot less efficient to use. There's also more clutter, not less, with all sorts of unrelated controls crammed into one tiny space.
- vog 12y ago
  Why not simply use shortcut keys? These are more efficient than having to grab to the mouse, especially on an editor, on which most the the time both your hand are at the keyboard anyway.
  - lottin 12y ago
    Yes but here we're talking about a graphical user interface and the whole purpose of a GUI is to let you do things by interacting with graphical elements.
    - vog 12y ago
      Then, I don't understand the criticism about efficiency for regular users, as this is – for text editors – also clearly out of scope for graphical user interfaces. (Of course, the story is different for the graphical domain such as Blender).
- ronjouch 12y ago
  > The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Agreed on that point. The Office team made a wonderful job at this, by also putting actions in the title bar (e.g. by default: save, undo, redo), but making it configurable. However, MS has orders of magnitude more dollars to develop/support/bugfix the added complexity, and given the hate of GNOME committers regarding anything configurable, I doubt that will ever happen in GNOME. I'm not bothered by it because, like others here, I use keyboard shortcuts for 99% of my actions and never need to reach for buttons or the sandwich menu, but I understand why I'd be bothered too if it wasn't the case.
wodenokoto 12y ago
XFCE is for people who like old GUI-design, so of course such users are going to get annoyed when modern GUI design starts to creep in. How anyone could consider the first screenshot of gedit prettier than the second is beyond me, but that is probably why I'm on OSX and not XFCE.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  I'm really interested in your use of the words 'modern' and 'old' in the above post. The human perceptual system does not change much from millennium to millennium and that our understanding of how that system works becomes richer over decades. Can you explain how one set of afordances can be considered more modern than another? I'm not being snarky, I'd really like to understand your idea of modern/old in this context.
  - heinrich5991 12y ago
    He probably means the word just in the sense that e.g. Wiktionary defines: Pertaining to a current or recent time and style; not ancient.[1] [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/modern#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/modern#Adjective EDIT: And by old, he probably means "old-style".
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      So XFCE 4.12 is a modern UI according to your definition, having just been released.
      - wodenokoto 12y ago
        Now you are being snarky.
        keithpeter 12y ago
        Well perhaps I'll confess to a little licence with this last reply. I really find use of the M word strange in relation to UIs. The whole idea of a GUI is, what, 40 years old?
anon4 12y ago
One thing I'll always miss with CSD is window snapping. Now it's shadow-snapping.
byuu 12y ago
First; I have a nice, long titlebar strip with left-aligned titles like I like. I can click anywhere in there and move my windows around (I know about alt+click, but I don't want to use my keyboard to move a window, and that doesn't work on my other OSes anyway.) Second; I like having a choice in how my window decorations work. I can run Clearlooks-Phenix, or Aguelemon, or Be, or Crux, or whatever else I like. Some of the themes have window borders on the sides (which I like), some don't. With CSD, my only option is a poor OS X imitation theme. No edges to the sides of windows (awful ... I can spare 4px so that my window doesn't blend into my desktop, and so I can grip for window resizes easier, thanks), no control over titlebar text placement (I don't want to scan to the middle of the title bar to read the title. The left is a consistent location.) Some of these WMs have special features like middle-click the maximize button to maximize it horizontally, nicer snap-to-window and snap-to-edge functionality, etc. Third; I want my title bars free of clutter. The title bar is for the title of the window, and for moving it, and at most you'd have the minimize/maximize/close buttons on a corner. I've been using windows the same way since Windows 3.1; so about 23 years now. You may scream Luddite, but I say that if it's not broken, don't fix it. With CSDs, now I have to dodge all of these ridiculous controls like "Open", "New Tab", "Save" and "Hamburger" when I want to move a window. And all of those further reduce the available space for a title. So I guess I can forget about showing the full filepath for my files open in gedit. Fourth; and this is a big one; consistency (eg discoverability.) All of my Xfce windows look the same, act the same, work the same. I have a title bar, a menu with all of my features, and usually an optional toolbar with all of the major features. Now with these CSDs, every single window looks entirely different. To get to menu commands, I have the added step of clicking on the hamburger first, which has a miniscule hit window. And that's assuming everyone designing these awful CSDs uses the same hamburger icon and placement. Again, we go from something we've been using for 23 years to "the trend of the week design." Because newer must mean better, right? CSDs are basically what you get on Windows with every OS driver installation GUI. I do not want that for my desktop at all. There's a reason this has all mostly stayed consistent since GUIs became a thing. It's not because people were lazy, unimaginative, not aware of design guidelines, or anything like that: it's because it works. And it works really, really well. A lot of us are simply tired of relearning how to use our computers every time a "modern" designer gets a hair up his ass and decides that we need to radically change all the things! The ribbons, the Metros, the CSDs, etc. So in four years, while I stick with my tried and true approach, Gnome 4 will have undoubtedly moved on to an even newer idea for how to design windows, and you'll be explaining to others why Gnome 3's CSD approach was flawed compared to $newTrendyDesign. And while you're learning to get used to where all of your operations have moved to, I'll be over here getting work done instead. > Motivations are (to my understanding) to save vertical space Even when I was stuck on 1024x768 CRTs back in the '90s, I can't say I've ever thought to myself, "if only I had an extra 10px of vertical screen space, my user experience would be vastly improved." The idea of crushing everything into this hot mess to save the same on my 2560x1600 panel (let alone 4K/8K panels) is just asinine. The only time I've ever had issues with the titlebar taking up space was during the 640x480 fallback VGA modes when installing my video card drivers. Besides, isn't the trend lately (even in Gnome) to add ridiculous amounts of excessive padding to everything, for the sake of all twelve touch screen desktop users? > reduce window clutter That window looks a lot more cluttered to me. I do turn off the toolbar (and status bar for that matter) on gedit 2, and I can turn off the menu (with an addon), and use keyboard shortcuts for my actions. I have no control over this CSD, whose height is twice that of a plain titlebar anyway (to accommodate button heights.) > and put common actions at the forefront The toolbar does the same thing, and common actions goes from 3 to 13 common actions in this case (with room to spare on the latter.) Even better, the toolbar is completely optional. For all but the three common actions, it is now harder to do things with the new gedit. And terrifyingly, one of those now-harder actions is "move the window."

dimsuz 12y ago

It looks awful with Xfce default theme. Gedit = Gnome Edit (I guess) - and it looks well and integrated really well when used in GNOME environment (gnome-shell). So its not fair to judge it this way. Try to open some Xfce apps in GNOME and it will look like horror too (compared to gnome ones) :)

digi_owl 12y ago

Design wankery under the banner of "usability" most likely. The whole Gnome/systemd/fedora sphere seems to have a severe case of OSX envy.