Plasma 6 - improve dialogues, reduce the suck

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Today’s issue

  • forcing hand to mouse, move window, click a ‘down’ arrow…

Is this more of an issue with KDE dialog boxes, or is it specific to individual projects?

The recent task of moving .config to .config-plasma5 and logging in again, then going dual-pane Dolphin and troubleshooting/restoring configs.

We’ll go with a half split technique and select HALF the old config and copy it across… then log in again to a fresh start each time restoring or removing ‘half’ a screen of config folders, before zooming in when issues return.

So now the first thing we see is that touching a key (like S to skip we actually messed with the filename now…

We MUST press ALT to get accelerators - but then it’s actually a bit of a pain to go ALTY to apply the tick :heavy_check_mark: Apply to All rather than just press ‘Y’.

We must also be careful to press TAB to get off that field, and now I want to Overwrite Older files… how to do this with keyboard?

It struck me that it’s more logical, with a focussed dialog box (Cancel selected) to press CSR to cancel/Skip/Rename. To OVERWRITE then pressing O should bring up the options All or Older files only.

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I’m not sure why, but someone just pointed out to me that they get ‘Yes, Cancel, No’ options in Windows - they can just press YNor C to push those buttons from the keyboard.

Can anyone explain why we can’t do this?

We could press R for Rename then type.

Cancel preselected as the default failsave, we can then press ‘N’, or ‘S’, or R/W…

O should trigger a dropdown list for options:

AOverwrite All
OOverwrite Older
NOverwrite Newer
BOverwrite Bigger
SOverwrite Smaller

So without ALT would be MUCH better, but if pressing Alt, then just dropping down the Overwrite menu would be cool.

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This in English. How does it handle other languages? Do they enforce Y, N and C or do they localize it?

Alt+key is a standard accessibility thing (called accelerators) that comes built-in to Qt (and Windows, MacOS, Electron and GTK). How to conciliate this with custom one-key shortcuts, and how to make sure the user doesn’t accidentally perform a destructive action?

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Ok, I’m not so sure about this…

I assumed that the ‘accelerator’ would be different for every language, having the same Qt accelerators, but accessible directly if a dialog pops up, because it seems obvious that the next keyboard entry (currently set to overwrite and type a filename) will be for an accessiblity shortcut underlined on the buttons.

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Accelerators are, yeah. In fact KDE translators can choose which key to use for each action. One-key shortcuts are a different thing, though, so I’m not sure it would be as easy to translate those as it is with accelerators, hence the question.

But my main concern is performing a destructive action accidentally if we use one-key shortcuts. After all, you lose the original file once you replace it, it’s something you definitely should stop for a moment and think about before doing. The dialog’s only one-key shortcuts are Enter, which cancels the operation, and I believe also Esc, which cancels the operation too, precisely so the user doesn’t accidentally confirm a destructive action.

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I agree. If we had a one-key-shortcut for a destructive action here we would probably need a confirmation for it even though we are already kind of in a confirmation dialog.

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Sure, that would work.

Are you sure?
YesAbsolutelyThanks, I’m sure!