[PATCH 2/4] Make some dialogs modal to MainWindow
Linus Torvalds
torvalds at linux-foundation.org
Tue Mar 11 11:52:11 PDT 2014
On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> most software that i've used make any preferences dialog modal.
> one potential user interaction issue here is if the main window is
> maximized [..]
I've had the opposite problem. The damn modal window isn't a real
window to some of the newer window managers, and opening the settings
window then *hides* the data in the main window that I need to set the
setting! I had that come up just the other week with some program. And
you can't move it around, it is stuck on top of the data you want to
see.
So it goes both ways. I personally tend to think that modal preference
windows are a bigger problem than the problem they purport to "solve",
and you should use modal windows only for trivial stuff that says
"ok/cancel". This is particularly true with the Subsurface settings
tool, where my main reason to ever go into it is to toggle
Imperial/Metric to see one or the other. If the modal preference
window then hides a large part of the main window, that is a PROBLEM.
That said, when it comes to our current settings menu, I actually
would prefer for the "Apply" / "Cancel without saving" / "Save" to go
away, and becomes just "Cancel"/"Save", and changing any of the unit
settings would automatically change the current units without any
extra mouse action - so that you can *see* that the units work, but
then press "Cancel" to go back to your own normal units.
That's independent of the "modal" issue, though.
Linus
More information about the subsurface
mailing list