Designing Komodo 9 - Share Your Opinion

If I haven’t a choice, then I want a light theme. Dark themes are notoriously difficult for those of us with any color blindness issues (a significant portion of the population). I have a very slight red/green color blindness and even for that slight degree of impairment, dark themes are problematic. But, I still want a choice!

As for the bottom panel, most people have wide screens these days, and it’s vertical, not horizontal, real estate that is at a premium. I always turn the bottom pane off to increase the vertical real estate, both for the editor and the side bars. When it’s needed, it pops up on it’s own, anyhow.

Is there a link to an explanation of the ‘commando’ feature? I’ve yet to be able to get a functional version of the alpha running on my system… it fails to start up codeintel.

The latest pre-release builds should be working fine:
http://downloads.activestate.com/Komodo/nightly/komodoide/latest-trunk/
and it fixes the codeintel issue (as far as I’m aware).

@toddw, I have the alpha up now, thanks. I saw the prefs for commando, but I still don’t really know what it is, how to invoke it or how to use it. Does it have something to do with the new search box on the menu bar? Is there anything you can link to to explain commando?

Sorry there is no documentation yet. You can open Commando with ctrl+shift+o (or cmd+shift+o on a Mac) and you can set keybindings by searching for “Commando” in the keybinding preference screen.

Please create a separate thread for questions unrelated to the topic of this thread though, such that we don’t loose focus :slight_smile: Thanks.

I prefer dark themes in general, although I have noticed on the current stable release the Abyss theme has some areas that don’t feel styled entirely. The success message after a plugin is installed is a good example of what I mean.

Either way, what you’ve done to the Commando window looks really good. I like that there is extra line height and the icons make it easy to identify the file type. I’m a relentless Fast Open user, but I feel the dialog in v8.5 is cramped, whereas this is much easier to read.

The addon dialog is a bit of an anamoly as it’s one of the few (if not only) places where we copied UI directly from Firefox. As such the styling here is a bit different. It’s still TBD if I’ll fix this for Komodo 9 or replace it with something more targeted at Komodo.

Next design change, the loading animation. Please see https://vimeo.com/103919716 and share your opinion.

When user do not type anything/do not search - I think animation must not be shown.

It won’t, read the video description.

Sorry. Okay, this animation is fine. I believe if I start making my own skin - I can change it on my loading picture :smile:

Using paint.net, I sliced a photo of what the I was trying to communicate regarding the bottom panel. There’s lots of room to the right of the tabs. Move the line below the the up and to the right.

thanks @bmcgin, I know what you meant, I just have a little trouble envisioning it in a way that doesnt look confusing/chaotic. Your mockup is definitely more compact but its also a bit of a mess (hard to figure out whats going on). I’ll play around and see if I can come up with a decent solution.

One feature that I would like to see (it might already be there, please tell me if it is), is a way to re-size the tabs, or set a certain length for them. I often have a lot of tabs open at once in Komodo, and it gets really annoying having to press the arrows at the top to search for the tab. I would like to make them just be as wide as maybe the first two or three letters, instead of the whole filename. It would make things a lot easier with my larger projects.

You would have to use Stylish for something like that. Note that you may want to have a look at the Open Files widget, which is much more geared towards letting you manage a large amount of open files.

How you look at this “Komodo”, guys? (it’s not a original Komodo, just a photoshop work, but I’m start develop it next week)
I know about glitch with some icons, I’m fix it soon).

Share your opinion and ideas what I must edit/change/etc.

Looks good, though the borders seem a bit out of place.

I’d suggest forking Spacemodo (or adding it as a sub-skin), as it looks quite similar to that in terms of how the elements are styled.

All borders (e.g. between top tabs of opened files) or something concrete?
Now I think it’s better to remove borders between right and bottom panes, from breakpoints tab (under and over Name, Language, Condition etc)…

Yep, great idea :wink:

More design changes:

Preferences:

Statusbar:

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Can we get it in the next update of Komodo 9?

Sure can. It’s already pushed so the next update will include these changes.

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