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A comment on Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Affecting Usability. Parent comment

Re:Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Af... by nine_k on Sunday July 06, 2025 @12:02AM (#44477720)
Some people complain about "visual clutter". Too many stimuli in the field of view assault their attention, and ruin their concentration. Such people want everything that's not in the focus of attention be gone, or at least be inconspicuous.

Some people are like airliner pilots. They enjoy every indicator to be readily visible, and every control to be easily within reach. They can effortlessly switch their focus.

Of course, there is a full range between these extremes.

The default IDE configuration has to do a balancing act, trying to appeal to very different tastes. It's inevitably a compromise.

Some tools have explicit switches: "no distractions mode", "expert mode", etc, which offer pre-configured levels of detail.

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Re:Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Af... by musicale on Sunday July 06, 2025 @12:31AM (#44477860)
This is a good idea. In basic/beginner mode, every control should be readily visible and discoverable.
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Re:Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Af... by theturtle32 on Sunday July 06, 2025 @04:05AM (#44478750)
In practice, "beginner mode" just makes inaccessible all controls deemed by the designer to be outside the realm of basic use cases.
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Re:Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Af... by layer8 on Sunday July 06, 2025 @07:35AM (#44479817)
This is why we used to have customizable toolbars, and relevant actions still accessible via context menu and/or main menu, where the respective keyboard shortcuts were also listed. No need to compromise. Just make it customizable using a consistent framework.
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Re:Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Af... by gmueckl on Sunday July 06, 2025 @11:29AM (#44481595)
There is a subtlety here. Having a configurable UI requires that all the buttons and menu entries have a somewhat consistent behavior among themselves. That isn't the case sometimes.

For example, if the GUI can have more than one instance of the same view open, toggle buttons for view modes become specific to individual view instances. Putting those into a global toolbar is wrong.

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Re:Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Af... by layer8 on Sunday July 06, 2025 @11:48AM (#44481742)
There can certainly be subtleties. Though in your example, I would argue the mode toggles then belong in a toolbar on each of the instances, which would be a configurable toolbar just like the global one.
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