The line numbers is a great example. There is no way to win other than make it easy to turn on.
And, yes, the preferences is an absolute mess. New users are intimidated when they open it up by all the choices. Same thing happens when they open the context menu in the project navigator and editors.
We've built a great UI framework at Eclipse. Every plugin is allowed to add anything they want to the preferences, menus, and toolbars. And they do so a lot and inconsistent ways and it ends up a mess.
We need some way to clean it up and simplify the UI for the majority of the users that need it.
Fabian,
Comments below.
On 13/07/2013 1:57 PM, Fabian Steeg wrote:
I think the discussion about getting new contributors is good and important.
Just one thought on a different aspect however: it seems many user issues come down to the default settings (about half of the top 10 on the site, and both bugs mentioned by Denis).
Yes, I was just chatting to someone else about that today.
Changing them has been tried and doesn't seem to work.
No, it will just annoy the hell out of people, much like the latest software update made all my firefox tabs bigger. I didn't ask for that and had to Google to find out how to make them smaller again, and even now, that style setting makes the font smaller,
so it just don't look the same anymore (the same size tabs but smaller fonts). It's just not an improvement! I really hate it, though I don't hate firefox!
Could some sort of settings profiles/themes help instead?
How about something like a prominent "configure" on the welcome page which brings up a wizard that includes the top 10 settings for behaviors that people complain and are completely configurable to eliminate those complaints.
I'm thinking something like an option to select the settings profile in the workspace selection dialog - out of the box there could simply be two options: 'built-in Eclipse settings' and 'Eclipse community settings' (which could be the most starred settings
profile available on the marketplace or so).
It would still be nice to easily deviate from this, without having to find the preferences in the rat's nest of preference. Determining the "most hated default settings" and the "most hated behaviors configurable via settings" and making the user aware of
their total control over these things on first start up seems like a good solution.
This could not only fix issues that make people angry, but on the positive side also introduce them to many awesome Eclipse features they didn't know about, and increase the feeling of community influence on how Eclipse behaves.
I agree that something along these lines would be a good thing to explore. It's silly to have people hate Eclipse because it doesn't show line numbers by default in the text editors. I personally hate line numbers. They're a waste of valuable space. But
that's just my biased opinion.
Cheers,
Fabian
It is. And I'm sure there are hate sites for every tool people use. Eclipse isn't unique that way.
My point is that user experience is so important to our success, we need to be sensitive to the issues our users are facing. There are a lot of such issues marked WONTFIX, and CDT is as guilty of that as anyone. I'm just wondering how we fix it.
Doug.
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