"exiting" plover button and start-up messages

[james]

plover-2.2.0

Starting plover, the plover dialog box currently shows three buttons, "P", "Configure...", and "About...", and displays a message on the command line,

 If Plover is quit using Ctrl-c, the /tmp/plover.lock file must be removed before Plover can be run again.

As it is now, the new user would be otherwise somewhat at a loss as to how to Exit plover, though the window-decoration Exit button - when there is one, which admittedly is almost always - seems to do the right thing. Still, that moment of uncertainty for the first-time user, wanting to exit plover, is simply not helpful and not necessary.

I would suggest adding a fourth, explicit, "Exit" button to the gui dialog box.

Similarly, when plover is started with an existing lock-file, there is a message on the command line,

 Another instance of Plover is already running.

This is not enough information to resolve the problem, where that information is only provided if plover starts _successfully_, ironically, and there is no advantage to being "cryptic".

I would suggest expanding the command line message, to include the solution, supposing that the lock-file is "accidental". For instance:

 Another instance of Plover may already be running. If no other instance of Plover is running, remove the stale lock file at "/tmp/plover.lock" and run Plover again.

Of course, a more elegant solution might be to not use a lock file at all, and instead, explicitly check the process table for an instance of python running plover, so that the user does not have to know anything about deleting lock-files - but still provide an informative command-line error message! For instance,

 The process table shows another instance of Plover already running with PID <blah>. If another instance of Plover has crashed, remove that process with "kill <blah>", and run Plover again.

James

[Joshua Harlan Lifton (joshua-harlan-lifton)]

The error message for alerting the user to another instance of Plover running should be improved and I like your suggested wording. As you suggested, examining the process list might work as well, though it leaves room for ambiguity and false positives. Something like:

ps -U $USER -u $USER u | grep `which python` | grep plover

might work on *nix systems, but I don't know what the equivalent would be for the experimental Windows port of Plover.

As for the explicit exit button, I'd rather rely on the window manager to supply its own window close button, which should be properly handled by Plover. As you mentioned, nearly all window managers provide such a button.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Plover has a lot of rough edges and it's exactly bug reports like this that will help smooth them out.