Trying To Set a Good Example, Honest!
Posted by pookzilla on June 14, 2007
If there’s one thing that’ll motivate me to post it’s the need to defend myself.
Yes, we removed the default visibility of the menu and toolbar Working Set items. We realize for some people that this will be annoying (even worthy of a posting!) but the fact of the matter is we have too many menu and toolbar items. We’re awash in them in fact. Some might say there is a glut. They are in abundance. You get the picture. Making this situation worse is the tendency for us to feel that our own items are SO important that they must be on by default not only in our own perspectives but everyone else’s as well. Given that some portion of our user base does not and never will use Working Sets we though it responsible that we remove the default visibility from these items. Returning their visibility is a trivial matter – it’s one simple trip to the Customize Perspective dialog. If you are truly put out by this change far beyond the point of reason and sanity please feel free to the “Working Set Tweaklet Feature” found at the brand new Platform UI incubator update site. It adds the Working Set actions to all perspectives by default. Also, there are some other “tweaklets” there that may be of interest to you.
AlBlue said,
It wasn’t meant to be something that you should need to defend yourself from … the only reason I mentioned your blog was that the original bug report said that you’d write a blog post about it and then didn’t
Whilst I agree that removing clutter is admirable, there needs to be a separation of toolbars and menus (sometimes you don’t want the toolbar but you do want it in the menu, as opposed to hidden completely); and secondly, there are some global kinds of actions/menus (e.g. ‘Show View’) that you *do* want on every perspective. Working sets, if you like them, are exactly that kind of thing; it’s not a perspective-sensitive extension, it’s a global one.
Unfortunately, I think the current solution isn’t the best, and it’s gone too far the other way (to the extent where people may not want to use working sets, or at least, never find out about them if they’re new to the platform). I also realise that nothing’s going to change for 3.3 about this, and that wasn’t my point in the post either; it was more to raise awareness of why it had happened.
Points to take from this:
1. I’m not in to personally attacking people; I’m more interested in pointing out deficiencies so that they get higher visibility (and thus a higher chance of being realised/fixed).
2. There’s a need for global actions, not just on a perspective-by-perspective basis.
3. Wanting to remove a toolbar button should be separate from wanting to remove a menu bar. Arguably, there’s more space in the menus than on the toolbar; I have 14 toolbar buttons and about 25 menu items in the Refactor menu alone.
4. It really needs to be mentioned in the New and Noteworthy if it’s not already, because it’s going to throw some people
Alex.
Michael Scharf said,
Unfortunately, you have the choice between either polluting the toolbar with the Working Set items or not have them at all. It’s not possible to have them only in the menu (see http://michaelscharf.blogspot.com/2007/06/customize-perspective-is-annoyingly.html)
Unless you make it two actionSets….
Michael
Chris said,
Just a quick note: If you go to that “incubator” update web page, there is a typo within the update URL. It needs to have an “s” at the end of “updates”:
http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/platform-ui/updates/
Cheers.
Eric said,
Is eclipse ever gonna get freely configurable toolbars and menus? I cannot believe that a product which has enjoyed so many person years of development time still is so restricted when it comes to that issue. After all, programs like MS Office have had that feature for over a decade now.
(Sorry if that sounds like ranting. I am honestly asking a question…)
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