Thoughts on v.10.1

Discussions
1

These are just some thoughts I had when trying out v.10.1.

The Toolbars still don’t make any sense to me.

  • I prefer the “classic layout”, but I’d be willing to try the “regular layout” if I understood what problem it was trying to solve. So half of the toolbars and the menu hamburger are floating at about the 3/4 mark–why?
  • For that matter, what problem is the Main Toolbar Left/Right trying to solve? It looks like the left has basic functions and the right has toolbox defined functions…plus macro and pane toggles. Huh? Why? And why can’t I move something right <–> left?
  • The dynamic toolbar is a nice addition, but no amount of [obvious] color scheme editing can change the color of these icons. Also, the changlog says we can add tools to the dynamic toolbar, but I can see nothing in the UI or the docs about how to do this.
  • Why are the other tools banished to the bottom of the side toolbar? Why can’t I add tools? Why can’t I move them? I got used to having several of those tools in my main toolbar. In 9.x I could at least re-order the toolbars. I’ve completely lost that.

The Color Scheme Editor is much better. Still a few oddities.

  • The “apply” button works only about half the time. I’ve found I need to restart Komodo (fortunately I’ve added a “restart” button) to really see what has been affected by the color change.
  • I had a lot of Komodo crashes while using the Color Scheme Editor. Nothing reliably reproduceable, but something is definitely going on with the tool.
  • It appears as though the Publishing “cloud” icons share the “Source Code Control: ***” color codes. This is very unclear from the color code titles. I don’t mind them sharing, but maybe rename the color code title to not be so tied to SCC.
  • A nod to the aforementioned lack of obvious way to change the icon color of the dynamic toolbar.

The Tutorial Tool seems like a nice touch, until I begin to wonder how does it make Komodo a better IDE. Honestly, the Tutorials feel like someone with clout decided that they would be a “cool” feature and pushed it through.

And, a very minor nit, the application icon is rather low resolution and looks sad next to my other running applications.

There are things I do like though.

  • I do like the flat look and I appreciate the minimalist approach to reducing clutter.
  • The SCC branch switching widget is great. It’s a supercharged version of neurobashing’s “Git Branch in Statusbar”.
  • I also like the Publishing force push/pull. I’ve been waiting for that for awhile.
  • And the many, many editor bug fixes.

I feel v.10.1 is close. I’m just about ready to upgrade–but not yet.

2

Hey @furnox, thank you for the great feedback! Most of the things you raised are definitely things we are aware of and are tracking internally. Let me go through them:

It’s placing go to anything front and central and grouping buttons together in a way that they are easy to find. It’s primarily intended for new users to make Komodo more intuitive to use. If you’re a long time user and you’re comfortable with the classic layout then the new layout has no added value for you besides maybe being more visually pleasing (subjective). Rest assured the classic layout will continue to be supported.

It’s solving the problem of “there are a whole bunch of buttons scattered randomly in one continuous line”. As said the way the buttons are organized is giving them specific groups. Whereas the leftside shows you buttons relative to buffer actions the right side gives you buttons relative to the UI and automation.

As for being able to move them again - this is planned. With the large amount of changes to the UI in 10.0 the ability to move them was temporarily removed as it posed a significant challenge that was at that time not worth the time.

They use the icon colors, note that in 10.0 the icon color pref was bugged, in 10.1 this should be fixed. As for creating your own, I apologize for this not being obvious. We will be blogging about this soon and providing thorough documentation.

I addressed most of these points already, but as for why “other tools are banished to the bottom of the side toolbar?”, this again goes back to grouping buttons in a meaningful way. These buttons represent tools that open in their own dialog and are accessed with a single click. Essentially tools that live inside of Komodo and integrate with it, but provide a whole new layer of functionality that could almost live on its own (conceptually).

This is unfortunately a limitation in the version of Mozilla we use, it will get better when we update our dependencies in the future.

I’ve not seen these myself, appreciate if you could log a bug on this with your findings so far.

Great advice, I will do this.

The tutorials are mainly targeted at enterprises and educators. It doesn’t hurt those that have no need for them, although it does also give us the opportunity to educate newcomers to Komodo and hopefully convert more users to Komodo users, which in the long runs helps you too.

That shouldn’t be the case. What OS are you using?

Always great to hear some positive with the constructive feedback on the negative, thank you for letting us know :slight_smile:

3

IIRC you’re using 32 or 64 version of your icon on Linux in .desktop file. That’s probably the case. Moving to svg would be a good step to solve any sort of issues with the icon.

4

Thanks Nathan. It’s enlightening to hear the rationale for the design.

It looks like when I tried out the “regular layout”, I had the “Go To Anything” input box disabled, which puts the “Main Toolbar - Right” in a strange, 3/4 position. You might position “Main Toolbar - Right” to the far right no matter what.

Ya, I don’t think the dynamic toolbar icons respect the color pref. I changed “Icon”, “Toolbar Icon”, and “Panel Icon” and none worked. It’s almost like there should be a “Status Icon”, but it’s missing.

I’ll keep playing with the Color Scheme Editor and see if I can see any pattern to the crashes.

I forgot to mention in my first post, but I’m running Komodo on Linux Mint, 17.3.

Thanks again!

5

That’s a good memory!

Unfortunately the .desktop file only affects the launch icon. When Komodo is running it looks like it is using an image resource compiled into the executable.

Screenshot

6

@furnox Oh man! That looks terrible! Thanks for reaching out about that. I can’t reproduce this on Ubuntu and neither can Mitchell (also on Ubuntu). I’m downloading Mint to test but could you see if the poor res icon persists after completely resetting your user profile? This would involve either moving aside your ~/.komodoide folder or setting KOMODO_USERDATADIR to a temp path in the terminal and starting Komodo from there.

  • Carey
7

Hi Carey.

I completely deleted my .komodoide folder (after backing it up), re-installed 10.1, and tried again. I also installed Linux Mint 17.3 to a VM for comparison.

I had interesting results.

Deleting .komodoide and reinstalling didn’t change a thing. However, the fresh Linux install looks better. Strangely, both installs used the 89455 build.

8

Thanks for checking @furnox. I’ve filed a bug for the poor quality image icon: https://github.com/Komodo/KomodoEdit/issues/1970

That’s really odd that the image didn’t update after a profile reset. I assume that means it’s cached by the OS somewhere then. Komodo only stores things in your profile folder to that’s the only place a stale icon could be as far as I know.

  • Carey