Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

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I wish they'd at least made it thinner. Some of those screenshots on the release page [1] (Kate, Kdenlive) look awful, the actually useful content (code, clip problem list) is squeezed into a corner by UI elements that are mostly empty. That thing is ridiculous, the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines, and the Clip Problems window is clipped at an 8-item view.

I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit and extra scrolling.

This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a trackpad or a mouse.

1: https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/

> the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines

No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall, including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger (esp taller) than it is on my machine.

Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I use keyboard shortcuts for.

I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it. The only real problem is that the window should probably be larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like you can freely resize it.

Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.

> No it's not 1080p tall?

No, it's nearly :-) as tall as a 1080p screen. It's 810px (edit: modulo some scaling?) but you also rarely get the full 1080p screen height on a Plasma desktop, since you've got a big panel at the bottom of the screen. Hence "nearly".

> Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.

Widget size, padding and margins are all part of the theme. I use QtCurve (which is pretty wasteful, too, though nowhere near as bad) and it's far more efficient to use.

A theme that makes better use of available screen space would allow one to keep the toolbar around, and make better use of search features (yes, the search panel is usually not folded out, but if you have to fold it out, search, then scroll or fold it back in to read around a search results, that's not exactly useful).

If you need to disable UI elements to make an application usable, that's not a good design.

> but you also rarely get the full 1080p screen height on a Plasma desktop, since you've got a big panel at the bottom of the screen

The panel is around 50px or so at most, by default it seems to be 44px. And I indeed think the screenshot is scaled, since it looks like it's bigger than on my machine.

I checked out QtCurve on my laptop which still runs KDE 5 (it seems to not be ported to Qt6), and it is indeed a bit more compact than Breeze 5. It's definitely a bit more on the cramped side in my opinion though, as the toolbar buttons have barely any padding at all around them. I definitely don't think it's wasteful, at least.

I agree that the toolbar and search pane are a bit hungry for vertical space in Breeze, but I also don't think most Kate users have the search pane open regularly. Making it more suitable for the sidebar (a la VSCode) might be nice though, but it seems it already does some limited self-rearrangement when horizontally limited (which could look better, granted).

It can be seen that Breeze 6 does save a few pixels here and there at least, without looking cramped in any way.

As for disabling UI elements, I personally think the toolbar in Kate is fundamentally wasteful. The only way it might become useful is when you customize it to contain actions that you do tend to use regularly.

It's very easy to remove toolbars (in Settings menu) and menu bars (Ctrl+M) on Plasma. I managed to remove all of them in certain apps, like Konsole and KWrite, which makes things look way better, indeed.

I use a more compact theme (QtCurve, at least with Plasma 5.27, I'm not sure if it's going to work with Plasma 6). IMHO if I have to disable UI elements to make an application usable, that just means they're too big. That's not a good design.

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