Several dialogs exceed screen height for a 1366x768 Screen

[Stefan D.]

Kicad has some dialogs that are to large to be displayed on a 1366x768 screen. This screen size is pretty common for consumer notebooks.
Here are some examples:
1. The hotkey dialog (at least on it is scrollable). The hotkey list dialog could be changed to a two column layout. But at least the minimum size should be so that it can be resized to fit on a netbook.
2. Another example is the "visibles" list in gerbview and pcbnew, which can't be displayed completly and isn't even scrollable.
3. The buttons in the toolbars to the left and to the right are to large. There should be a possibility to split a toolbar in two parts, or to let the user rearrange the buttons in the toolbars (a good example is libreoffice). Another option could be to offer a toolbar item to show the not-displayed buttons (again look at libre office to see what I mean).

I think the UI design should be made so that it is at least possible to work on a netbook screen with 1024x600 resolution. Working on such a resoulution may be a PITA, but there should at least be the possibility to do so. And not only netbooks have these small resolutions, but also beamers.

[Dick Hollenbeck (dickelbeck)]

> I think the UI design should be made so that it is at least possible to
> work on a netbook screen with 1024x600 resolution. Working on such a
> resoulution may be a PITA, but there should at least be the possibility
> to do so. And not only netbooks have these small resolutions, but also
> beamers.

I do not agree. Therefore I will not be spending any time on this.

Hopefully any fix for this will not adversely affect the folks with larger screens.

Dick

[Lorenzo Marcantonio (l-marcantonio)]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 03:54:25PM -0000, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> > I think the UI design should be made so that it is at least possible to
> > work on a netbook screen with 1024x600 resolution. Working on such a
> > resoulution may be a PITA, but there should at least be the possibility
> > to do so. And not only netbooks have these small resolutions, but also
> > beamers.
>
> I do not agree. Therefore I will not be spending any time on this.
>
> Hopefully any fix for this will not adversely affect the folks with
> larger screens.

All of our laptops are at most 768 rows BTW... I think that 1024x768 should be the minimum target resolution; with some tweaking (themes, and esp. font size) maybe you could fit everything in 600.

I agree that while for a 600-768 the current layout is too big (esp. the new icons), the old icons are too small for use on a bigger screen; a good solution would be doing like openoffice (a preference for big/small screen) or something like the gtk theming (no idea if it's possible with wx)

--
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl

[Stefan D. (stefan-sdroege)]

Actually I didn't intended to shrink everything. If my bookshelf is full, I wouldn't throw away all books and buy me only the paperback versions either.
I think the button size and everything is perfect. I just want to propose to make the UI layout modular, by allowing the toolbars to be divided and movable, or to hide some buttons if the user decides to do so. But all this should be done by the user, not a compile option or anything like that. So nothing of that what I am missing should affect users with larger screens.
Look at the libre office toolbars to know what I mean.

[Ivica Kvasina (kvasina)]

+1 on this.

[Lorenzo Marcantonio (l-marcantonio)]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 05:34:25AM -0000, Ivica Kvasina wrote:
> +1 on this.

Tried to use a smaller theme or something if gtk allow this???

I acknowledge that 600 is a little small, a good compromise would be 768
IMHO. Also applies to the toolbars (the vertical ones in pcbnew)

--
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl

[Ivica Kvasina (kvasina)]

Unfortunately vertical resolution of 768 is standard on vast majority of laptops.
If there is something that does not work on 768, many users would be left out.

[Dick Hollenbeck (dickelbeck)]

On 05/31/2012 04:14 PM, Ivica Kvasina wrote:
> Unfortunately vertical resolution of 768 is standard on vast majority of laptops.
> If there is something that does not work on 768, many users would be left out.
>

If it helps, think of KiCad as not being free. The cost of using it is to buy sufficient
hardware to run it.

The notion that KiCad is free should be put to death anyway.

[Ivica Kvasina (kvasina)]

In my opinion KiCad being free or not has nothing to do with how usable it should be.

My argument was that Kicad should not have problems on common laptops (1366x768) because this is what most students bring to Kicad course. Last time I checked it on a machine with 1366x768, there was a scrollbar in the Hotkey List and I could not find anything else that would not fit display. I would say this is resolved.

I am not concerned with smaller products (netbooks, PDAs etc).

[Martin Errenst (imp-d)]

I've used KiCad myself on an netbook too in the past. At least I knew that there are some more icons in the toolbar (resizing the window above screen resolution, moving it, click the icon, back to normal fullscreen again....).
Spend quite some time this evening to figure out how to get those "overflow" function from wxgtk running. Turns out you can use it only on elements (icons/tools) which are not from the wxITEM_CHECK type (it works with wxITEM_NORMAL, didn't tried the other ones).
So here is a small patch demonstrating how it works - only with the "Place origin point for ..." icons since those are more or less "one shot" you can only place one of them and you will not bother that their icons don't look toggled.
Anyway, I'm not happy how it works in the background - if the icon starts to disappear it might not show up in the overflow until a bigger portion of it is "covered"...
The over small icon can be set hidden if there's no need to display the overflow buffer. (For this, the PCB_EDIT_FRAME class needs its own OnSize() function - dunno if we can avoid this).

All this aside, the microwave toolbar can only be reached from the left toolbar which is quite sad. To prevent loosing the microwave toolbar icon and the layer manager one, we maybe should place the mm, inch and polar coordinates switch into the upper toolbar - so the user has them there on hand if he discovers that the grid settings have the wrong units (we still have plenty of space in that one).

If we assume a screen height of 768 pixels, only the left toolbar is problematic in pcbnew, eeschema is already fine.

I would further suggest to place the layer manager and microwave icons in the toolbar on the right side, since they will appear there too (no mouse jogging needed if you need it only for a short moment like disabling one layer). Since that will overflow the toolbar again for 768 pixel height, "Highlight net" and "Display local ratsnest" might move over to the left, since all there will be viewing / display related (besides disable drc and disable auto delete of old track).

I offer myself to reorder the icons as described - if wanted.

[Martin Errenst (imp-d)]

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1285425 , some of the pain with the left toolbar should be eased now ;).

[Mark Roszko (mark-roszko)]

r5196 fixed the hotkey editor being too large

[xzcvczx (xzcvczx)]

Due to this being a bug thats containing many issues i am closing it, If you have a single issue then open a bug for that issue. Currently there is a bug for the layer widget not being resized correctly and other parts have been fixed making this bug report hard to parse as what still needs to be done.

There is also a bug report i believe regarding the toolbar heights and why its not currently implemented as the overflow box is broken on osx