Personally I think the preview is a bit overkill - it's useful when you're choosing your layouts, but when you've decided which layouts you want to switch between, you (or at least I) mostly use the icon to switch between layouts. It adds an element that makes the popup many times more complex. I'm also not sure how it's supposed to work, does the preview change on hover? If that's the case, how do you give the textbox focus? (It may not require focus, but that's not completely obvious despite the text; imagine someone who doesn't get that and frustratingly tries to click on the textbox without accidentally switching layout.) If it changes on click, you would have to reopen the popup to see the preview.

The preview is an interesting idea, but I personally prefer to keep this popup simple. In that case the standard systemtray popup is simply too big.

I like the icons though and agree that text is better than flags.

Hans wrote:Personally I think the preview is a bit overkill - it's useful when you're choosing your layouts, but when you've decided which layouts you want to switch between, you (or at least I) mostly use the icon to switch between layouts. It adds an element that makes the popup many times more complex.

It might be better to work this widget like the network manager one, and have a 'show preview' button that would display a keyboard underneath the selected item when pressed.

davidwright wrote:

Hans wrote:Personally I think the preview is a bit overkill - it's useful when you're choosing your layouts, but when you've decided which layouts you want to switch between, you (or at least I) mostly use the icon to switch between layouts. It adds an element that makes the popup many times more complex.

It might be better to work this widget like the network manager one, and have a 'show preview' button that would display a keyboard underneath the selected item when pressed.

It seems I was not clear enough, but this was always meant to be like the network manager widget. When you click it, there is an expansion and the preview of the selected item is shown. But the mockups are still lacking clarity. If there is still interest I will try to improve it.

kdeuserk wrote:It seems I was not clear enough, but this was always meant to be like the network manager widget. When you click it, there is an expansion and the preview of the selected item is shown. But the mockups are still lacking clarity. If there is still interest I will try to improve it.

The difference to Plasma-NM is that in Plasma-NM, no connection is not expanded by default (not even the active one), expansion only happens if you click one connection. And I guess the idea was to have the same for the keyboard layout switcher: Only show a preview on demand, not immediately when the switcher is opened.

kdeuserk wrote:It seems I was not clear enough, but this was always meant to be like the network manager widget. When you click it, there is an expansion and the preview of the selected item is shown. But the mockups are still lacking clarity. If there is still interest I will try to improve it.

Sounds better, but I still don't understand the use case for this feature. Personally I already know which layouts I have configured, the switcher is just to (1) show me the current layout in the system tray, and (2) allow me to quickly switch between layouts. I can't think of a case where I would need to see a preview of the layout. (Besides the preview could be confusing if your keyboard doesn't look like the configured one.)

I like the icons kdeuserk came up with quite a lot, and as many others pointed out, flags are a no-go without colours.

As for the preview:
To me it feels way to small to put a keyboard layout in the widget. Would most users even be comfortable reading the different keyboard letters at that size? And since the keys themselves don't move around, all the preview graphics would be identical except for the letters (and what about the really small stuff, like diacritic marks like acute and grave)?

If there should be a preview, I think it would be much more useful to have a preview button, which, while being pressed, displays a large scale layout on the screen. A hovering on-screen keyboard if you will, but which disappears again when the preview button is released.

A larger scale layout preview could also be used as a guide in case one has changed to a new keyboard layout and forgotten where a certain sign is. I know I've had to resort to googling before to find certain signs on some unfamiliar keyboard layout.

veqz wrote:As for the preview:

If there should be a preview, I think it would be much more useful to have a preview button, which, while being pressed, displays a large scale layout on the screen. A hovering on-screen keyboard if you will, but which disappears again when the preview button is released.

Great idea!

A larger scale layout preview could also be used as a guide in case one has changed to a new keyboard layout and forgotten where a certain sign is. I know I've had to resort to googling before to find certain signs on some unfamiliar keyboard layout.

The same happens to me still …I use the Neo2 layout on my laptop, which means I have to blind type an ergonomic layout with 6 layers. I usually carry a printed cheat-sheet with me all the time.

IMHO having the keyboard layout preview could just look cluttered and i'd have already chosen my different layouts anyway (like Hans pointed out).

My vote would be to have:

The layout as it is in the second image in myrjola's first post (but with the abbreviations - 'en', 'sv' & 'fi' - right justified like in the Gnome screenshot below that image) plus a preview button as suggested by veqz a few posts ago that brings up a good-sized temporary pop-up that disappears as soon as you release the preview button.

I agree that flags-as-system-tray-icons isn't the best idea - the 'letter within a box' design posted by kdeuserk was perfect though!

One thing - if a left click on the system tray icon will bring up this instead of switching to the next keyboard layout directly then it would be nice to retain the ability to use the scroll wheel on the system tray icon so that you can switch layouts without opening this at all if you don't want to!

ken300 wrote:...it would be nice to retain the ability to use the scroll wheel on the system tray icon so that you can switch layouts without opening this at all if you don't want to!

I'm afraid of accidental execution without clear feedback. Isn't the use case of frequently toggling keyboard layouts covered by the sticky plasmoid, i.e. when it is placed somewhere at the desktop?

Heiko,

Wouldn't that mean clearing part of the desktop where the plasmoid is though?

If so i'd just use the layout switcher described here, but i'd prefer it if there was scroll wheel support. Until today i didn't even realise that you could use the scroll wheel on the existing switcher - i just use the left-click to switch layouts - so i don't think there's much chance of accidentally scrolling on it (plus it's obvious if you change it by mistake and easy to change it back).

ken300 wrote:If so i'd just use the layout switcher described here, but i'd prefer it if there was scroll wheel support.

Cool, I'd like to have a scroll wheel and cursor key support in the status bar also in klipper, ... with shortcut's and cursor key it would be very useful. (sorry a little bit off topic)

Note that there is an attached KCM to set up the multiple keyboards, this is just fast switching _and_ indication of your current layout (as it can change from shortcuts or by setting it to per-app switching) . I don't think previews are too useful here as the user has already configured things; they don't need a visual representation.

Personally I'd just not have an expanded view at all. Left click should change the layout (as that's the primary case) at which point you'd never see a popup.
Putting it in a popup means 2 clicks and people who do switch layouts seem to do it very often.

Other notes:
- changing layout will trigger an OSD in the centre of the screen (could be disabled when changing from the plasmoid...but that's more work.)
- the layout code MAY be more than 2 letters long (for example Maori) and the label can be user set (so any length)
- related to the above, if it's in the system tray all things have to be square...because.. reasons.

david_edmundson wrote:Personally I'd just not have an expanded view at all. Left click should change the layout (as that's the primary case) at which point you'd never see a popup.
Putting it in a popup means 2 clicks and people who do switch layouts seem to do it very often.

So it's okay for SNI's (Status Notifier Items) to have different behaviour? As I said before I didn't find any human interface guidelines for them so I was unsure. I also feel that it's better to emulate the old behaviour of switching the layout with left-click or mouse-scroll. The right-click menu should provide at least a shortcut to the KCM and preferrably a shortcut for the layout preview. I think the only thing the popup provides is consistency with other SNIs and this can be a big deal from a designer's point of view.

It's already an SNI with different behaviour, they look like plasmoids and behave differently.
If it's a plasmoid and the behaviour is different, that's not really any worse.

The reason I want it turning into a plasmoid are:
- We're not passing a shoddy 16x16 pixmap and badly scaling it (which is what we currently do)
- Users can put the switcher in different panels, not just the systray.

I haven't looked at anything KDE related for quite a few weeks, i came back to it today and looked at how things have progressed. I thought that replacing the individual menus etc for each of the system tray icons with the pane that pops up whenever anything in the system tray was clicked (i don't know its name!) and it's content can change to whatever's been clicked was brilliant and gave a more unified system tray experience!

I think that one thing that makes KDE seem unfriendly is when you click on the system tray icons each one seems to behave a bit differently - the new system overcomes that which is why i said that i'd just use the layout switcher described in this thread, but i'd prefer it if there was scroll wheel support.

To my mind, having a more unified system tray experience outweighs the inconvenience of an extra click (even though i'd prefer not to have to) or the convenience of being able to place it in any panel.