Re: two or more lines of icons

Uwe> On 14 Oct 2003, galibert(a)pobox.com wrote: Uwe> Why disasters? It's a matter of personal preference, tradition, and to some extent the user population. Emacsen traditionally have very powerful keyboard-oriented interfaces with learning curves that are not terribly steep but very deep. They provide lots of facilities to customize Emacs's behavior to your habits. It's always possible to recursively use your previous customizations to do something more powerful, or to conform more accurate to your needs. Windows applications, on the other hand, are designed to have a very steep learning curve that bottoms out immediately, like toasters, blenders, and other modern kitchen appliances. My usual experience with a Windows program is that it has tons of buttons, none of which does quite what I want it to. (Freecell and Minesweeper are exceptions. Minesweeper is especially nice since it can be configured to have hundreds of buttons, all of which are essential to its use. :) In less prejudiced terms, in a text editor toolbars for most functions are an extremely inefficient UI compared to the keyboard, for a practiced user. On the other hand, with suggestive icons a toolbar can help an occasional user find important common functions quickly, while the menus (again, if well-organized) can provide a hierarchical index to less frequently used functions. Emacsen have historically not been for occasional users; they appeal to users who use them as their primary application, and even their "operating environment". So I wouldn't call it a "UI disaster" (150 million AOL users can't all be 100% wrong ;-), but I question whether we're doing either the existing users or potential users a big favor by targeting the number of buttons in the default configuration of XEmacs. On a 1024x768 display, it should easily be possible to get 20 buttons in the toolbar on a reasonably-sized frame. A better idea, IMO, is to make sure that there are no more than about 10, and that they are useful. I use the Info, Print, and News buttons in the default toolbar, and could dispense with the News and Info buttons---I use News exactly once per session, and most of the time I get to Info via C-h C-f. The other 12 I only use if someone reports a bug. In fact, verifying bug reports is the main reason I build with a toolbar any more. OK, clearly I'm unusual, but really I have to wonder what good another 15 buttons would do. Especially when a bit of work would make the tabs a significantly better interface to application switching than a toolbar is. Uwe> would Xemacs become more instable because of more icons? I Uwe> was pointed to kile /kile.sourceforge.net/ which comes with a Uwe> lot of integrated icons. Does this make the application Uwe> unstable, if so, why? No, it has nothing to do with instability of the application. Excessive iconization has, however, been known to drive Emacs developers into a certain degree of mental instability. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.