Mail Archives: geda-user/2012/11/16/19:35:10
On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 2:01 PM, John Doty <jpd AT noqsi DOT com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 16, 2012, at 2:36 PM, Peter Stuge wrote:
>
>> John Doty wrote:
>>> the gschem UI is what it is, very old fashioned, and trying to
>>> improve it by adding "features" has made it harder to use, not
>>> easier. 21st century UI's are fundamentally very different. I
>>> would support an effort to make a modern gschem.
>>
>> I'd love to hear more about this!
>>
>> What are your biggest issues with gschem UI?
>
> I have few issues, but I'm an old greybeard. I don't have any issues with a manual transmission on a car either (indeed, it can be advantageous), but I understand that many no longer learn to drive such a thing.
>
>>
>> And how would they not be issues with a modern UI?
>
> If you're not used to how GUI worked circa 1990, I expect the gschem UI is very confusing. For example, it has too many dialog boxes, often unexpectedly modal. There's a dialog to create text, different one to edit text, and yet another to edit text that happens to be an attribute. Then there's a command for rotation. A modern GUI would let you create and edit text in place, and give you an "inspector" that, if text is selected, would let you adjust rotation, size, alignment, font, etc. You also might have shortcuts for rotation and size adjustment, but the universal tool for presentation would be the inspector.
Some UI have inspectors but for always-used things like rotate plenty of
modern UI just make you memorize it, blender and all other 3D model editors
(which put about as heavy a load on UI as any programs) have piles of things
like this.
The key is to give users some programmed way to find out about it/learn it
in the first place, which is where gEDA suffers from its good but somewhat
scattered and disjointed documentation.
Britton
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