Re: [PATCH] user-manual: mention git gui citool (commit, amend)

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Aug 5, 2007, 12:09 UTC
Message-ID: <99870CA9-D204-40C2-9BC5-2353EBE18816@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <20070803125601.GA28323@fieldses.org>

On Aug 3, 2007, at 2:56 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 11:01:01PM -0400, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
>> Steffen, you seem to be more in-tune with the Mac UI standards
>> than I am.  Any suggestions on what I can do in git-gui to make
>> this feature more obvious to users?

 From time to time I have a look at the Apple Human Interface
Guidelines [1]. They contain large Apple specific sections but also
ideas of general interest.

Show 20 quoted lines

>> I myself use a Mac OS X based PowerBook as my primary development
>> system, but I have to admit, I'm not the best GUI developer that has
>> ever walked on this planet.  Far far far from it.
>
> You're way ahead of me!
>
>> So I'd really love to do better.  But frankly I'm at a loss here
>> and just don't know what sort of change to make.
>
>> Side note: Someone recently asked me how to move individual files
>> to the left side of the UI (to stage them).  Apparently this person
>> had been using git-gui for months by just clicking "Add Existing"
>> (recently renamed to "Stage Changed").  It never occurred to the
>> user to try clicking the file's individual icons.  Or to select
>> the files they were interested in and look for a menu option that
>> might work on that selection.
>
> The one thing that struck me when I fired up git-gui was that it  
> wasn't
> obvious to me which things I should try clicking on.

I had the same experience. I didn't recognize that the document icon left to a filename is actually a button with an action attached to it. I thought it would be there just to distinguish a file from a directory.

I'd tend to use kind of a push button instead of an icon to indicate the action of adding a file to the index (staging). Maybe an arrow facing left? And an arrow facing right to unstage?

Show 19 quoted lines

> For example: the buttons, drop-down menus, and check-boxes all cry out
> to be played with.  But the filenames in the lists at the top are less
> obvious, and it might never have occurred to me on my own to right- 
> click
> on the diff hunks at the bottom.  That just looks like passive  
> colorized
> text to me.
>
> I don't know what sort of user-interface conventions say "play with
> me!", though.  Random ideas:
>
> 	- maybe the cursor should change shape over the diff hunks (or
> 	  just the headers?)
> 	- maybe buttons, hunk headers, file names, etc., should all be
> 	  in the same color?
> 	- maybe the hunk headers could benefit from a little more
> 	  decoration?  I don't know how to do that without just making
> 	  the display look more cluttered, though.
> 	- maybe left-clicking on diff hunks should do something too?

In general it's always a good idea to make every action accessible with only a single (left) mouse button. This may seem ridiculous nowadays, but it really help to keep things obvious. Right buttons and context menus have a value for the experienced user to access things more efficiently, but they should not be essential.

	Steffen

[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/ Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html