A little while ago Colomar started a thread to identify dialogues that had unnecessary scrollbars when using the new Breeze theme because they didn't look good. When i was looking for them i noticed another issue that personally i think makes some of the dialogues look like they could do with a little design love! In the right-click menus of the icons in the System Tray there's a '...Settings' menu item where you can configure things just for that icon (and the same for the widgets that you can add to the panels or desktop). For example right click on the 'Network' icon in the System Tray and click on 'Network Settings'.

Some of these '....Settings' like this one for the clipboard are nicely laid out and are a reasonable size:


But some like this one for the Network manager just contain a single button for changing the keyboard shortcut and look way too empty IMO:


Two solutions spring to mind:

1 - Either resize these 'empty' dialogues to fit their content better - but the size of dialogues with several pages would stay at the size that suited the most 'full' pages they wouldn't keep changing size as you looked at the different pages, that would be awful

2 - Add something in the grey big empty space on the 'empty' dialogues - either a nicely styled image or something that won't make the page look cluttered - or something useful like restyling the dialogue from scratch to display the other keyboard shortcuts that you've already setup.

What do you think - any good ideas??

This looks like a bug to me. In Plasma 4, the settings dialogs that had only the shortcut were indeed reduced to the minimum size, which makes sense.
Well spotted!
Did you find this in all Plasmoids that had only the shortcut setting? I'd say just report it as a bug (either in the affected Plasmoids if not all are affected, or in plasmashell if it's the same for all).

Colomar,

All of the Plasmoids etc that only have the keyboard shortcut on that '....Settings' menu look like that - a huge amount of grey space.

The reason that i posted it here rather than just filing a bug report was that although i think they look too sparse & empty, i think having all of the '....Settings' pop ups the same size regardless of whether they contain lots of options or the just the 'Keyboard shortcut', does make everything feel a bit nicer and as though we've put some thought into how everything looks.

Another thing is that the pop ups that have just got 'Keyboard shortcuts' on them are missing the 'Help' and 'Restore defaults' buttons on the bottom left of all the other '....Settings' dialogues. As far as i can tell those two buttons would be just as useful on the 'Keyboard shortcut' only pages as they are on all the others but there isn't room for them if we simply shrink the pop ups.

I thought that maybe if we could come up with a good way of keeping the 'Keyboard shortcuts' only pop ups the same size as the rest of the dialogues but stop them looking so sparse then it would make the whole experience more unified, make it feel as though a bit more thought had gone into the design and get across to the user 'the Help and Restore defaults buttons will be on EVERY setup dialogue, not just the bigger ones' that might be good for consistency too.

Hm, I don't know. I don't see the settings dialogs of different Plasmoids as belonging together. They are more like settings dialogs from different applications to me, and I wouldn't strive for making all of those the same size.
On the other hand, the Shortcut pages of multi-page Plasmoid settings dialogs would benefit from a nice design idea to fill the remaining space as well, so I'm not against trying to come up with something.

What I am against, though, is putting a Help button in every dialog just for the sake of consistency. Having a Help option in UIs "just because that's what you do" is widespread in KDE applications. However, I don't think that's a good thing, because only a minority of them lead to actually useful content. This means that if users actually seek help and click on many of those Help buttons, they will be disappointed in most of the cases. Which in turn means they will soon learn that "The Help button usually won't help me anyway" and therefore miss the occasional help content that actually is useful.
Of course another - and clearly better - way to fix this is to put actually useful content behind every Help button. That is definitely a noble goal but alas, I don't see it as realistic. And even if we do strive for that, Help buttons should only be in dialogs where there already is useful content.

The same goes for Reset buttons: They must only be there if the dialog actually does provide reset functionality. If every dialog can have that, then yes, we should make it the standard, but again, the buttons hould only be there if it works.

That's a good point:

the Shortcut pages of multi-page Plasmoid settings dialogs would benefit from a nice design idea to fill the remaining space as well, so I'm not against trying to come up with something.

That's a good point too:

Having a Help option in UIs "just because that's what you do" is widespread in KDE applications. However, I don't think that's a good thing

If the 'Help' or 'Reset' buttons don't link to anything useful shouldn't they be reported as bugs? If so, maybe we (or I) need to start another thread with a document that people can contribute to to try and identify any settings pages (either in the right-click menus of the default set of widgets or pages within System Settings itself) that have redundant buttons that don't link to useful information - like your recent thread to find dialogues with unnecessary scrollbars.

What kind of "help" would you put behind a shortcut button? "You must attach your keyboard first."?
colormar is imo absolutely right here - either one can provide some *actual* help or skip the button altogether - having it everywhere also clutters the UI and makes our users (need help to press a shortcut) feel like idiots =)

As for size ./. sparse:
Ideally such "throw away" dialogs should simply fit size on opening (::adjustSize(), it *is* that simple) - so this looks like a bug.
For multipage dialogs the problem remains, though, but i believe a "nice image" (colorful cute konqi) would end up being too distracting (drawing attention away from the actual GUI)

Bespin and QtCurve had features for watermark-a-like overlays - such could be done for the background of multipage dialogs exclusively (resp. hinted to the style by the widget)

luebking

I agree that a colourful image would be distracting - i was thinking of a VERY subtle image, i like the idea of a watermark

I already reported a related bug on this some time ago, though I can't find it right now. Basically it would be nice if the dialogue would tell one what the shortcut one can configure there is for.

Sogatori wrote:I already reported a related bug on this some time ago, though I can't find it right now. Basically it would be nice if the dialogue would tell one what the shortcut one can configure there is for.

Good idea! Maybe "Set a shortcut for activating the [Name] Plasmoid"?

Sogatori said:
it would be nice if the dialogue would tell one what the shortcut one can configure there is for.

Colomar said:
Good idea! Maybe "Set a shortcut for activating the [Name] Plasmoid"?

+1 from me too - that is a good idea,