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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Eierlegende Wollmilchsau
On 12/09/2015 04:58 PM, Doug Schaefer wrote:
You bring up a great point about the Toolbar. It’s the most obvious affect of the tragedy of the commons, and it’s why I’m having a personal war against it. Do these buttons really need to be in the face of the user all the time? How often are any of these actually used versus the real estate they take up. Wouldn’t it look better if we had fewer toolbar buttons but make them a little bit larger to make them easier to understand for new users? How do we make this better?
I've watched a newish Eclipse user (regular NetBeans users) taking an Eclipse IDE JEE and installing JBoss Tools in it. Then seeing a very crowded toolbar.
He wasn't very annoyed about the more-than-humanly-sortable numbers of items in toolbar, he actually even told me that it was fine because he expected that. And his immediate reaction was just to try to hide some of those items. And that's where he felt a bad experience: he didn't manage to find out how to hide toolbar buttons. The first place he looked for was the right click on the toolbar, and he was disappointed to not see the way to customize toolbar there -I tracked this in https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=477670 and there's a pending patch-, then he went into menus and didn't find anything about toolbar. The right menu to choose was "Customize Perspective" but it's really not something a newish user can guess.
So IMO, rather than debating on the content of the toolbar, things on which all of us will never agree, it's more important to empower the user in customizing it. Eclipse IDE already has this ability to customize toolbar. Just making it more accessible might be enough for at least this one user. Just having a fix https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=477670 would be a more important progress for toolbar than brainstorming about what to keep in/move out.


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Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
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