Ark currently makes an ugly use of the status bar:

1. By default, nothing is displayed on it, resulting in a big wasted space on the bottom.
Example: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/K4OpdQuIFy6c8rR

2. Ark violates the status bar's HIG [1] point about: "Do not use the status bar or any kind of replacement to display advisory messages in place of standard tool-tips". Example: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/GxjrCgkg1ri1AQY

Ark does provide an option to hide the status bar (in the Settings menu), but it's not checked by default. The simplest solution would to enable it by default, so that the status bar would be always hidden (unless the user doesn't want to).

However, there is another element that would be lost, in that case.
While opening or extracting archives, Ark shows the progress in a progress bar on the status bar.
For instance, this is Ark while opening a huge archive, like GCC source code: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/ZiPQH88KUaK1hTX

This behavior partly fits with the HIG about progress indicators [2], but I wonder whether we can move this progress bar somewhere else, or replacing it with something else. Once we do that, we will be able to actually kill the status bar, once for all.

Suggestions?

[1]: https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usabi ... /StatusBar
[2]: https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usabi ... sIndicator

elvisangelaccio wrote:Ark currently makes an ugly use of the status bar:

1. By default, nothing is displayed on it, resulting in a big wasted space on the bottom.
Example: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/K4OpdQuIFy6c8rR

2. Ark violates the status bar's HIG [1] point about: "Do not use the status bar or any kind of replacement to display advisory messages in place of standard tool-tips". Example: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/GxjrCgkg1ri1AQY

Ark does provide an option to hide the status bar (in the Settings menu), but it's not checked by default. The simplest solution would to enable it by default, so that the status bar would be always hidden (unless the user doesn't want to).

However, there is another element that would be lost, in that case.
While opening or extracting archives, Ark shows the progress in a progress bar on the status bar.
For instance, this is Ark while opening a huge archive, like GCC source code: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/ZiPQH88KUaK1hTX

This behavior partly fits with the HIG about progress indicators [2], but I wonder whether we can move this progress bar somewhere else, or replacing it with something else. Once we do that, we will be able to actually kill the status bar, once for all.

I, as a user, like the idea of "killing" the status bar or making it optional. It would give Ark a cleaner look, and this is what KDE applications often lag behind in comparison to GNOME applications (I don't want a cleaner look if it costs relevant functionality, but as you said, showing the status bar doesn't makes sense).

While the progress bar is only shown while the content of a file isn't loaded, it could move to the list view which is empty when it doesn't show any files. It could be replaced by an animation or complemented with one.

janop wrote:While the progress bar is only shown while the content of a file isn't loaded, it could move to the list view which is empty when it doesn't show any files. It could be replaced by an animation or complemented with one.

This is what Android applications do, with their spinning circle. However I don't know whether there is an equivalent Qt widget.

Indeed this is not an issue specific to Ark. I'm not sure how other KDE applications handles the loading of huge files. For instance if I open a huge text file (> 100 MB) with KWrite or Kate, I get an unresponsive window until the whole file is read.