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Ax9D / pw-viz

Pipewire graph editor written in Rust. WIP⚠️
GNU General Public License v3.0
230 stars 14 forks source link

Show controls at the bottom à la Blender #9

Closed jansol closed 2 years ago

jansol commented 2 years ago

Fairly straightforward feature that does a lot for user friendliness. Blender updates these dynamically when modifier keys are pressed or a tool is in use, but in the case of pw-viz just showing a static list that also shows the modifier keys is probably enough.

image

Ax9D commented 2 years ago

This makes sense in Blender's case as it has a lot of context sensitive shortcuts, I think pw-viz's controls are simple/intuitive enough to not require such a feature, moreover pw-viz now has a controls window which was added in https://github.com/Ax9D/pw-viz/pull/3. However, representing keys visually like how Blender does could be an improvement.

jansol commented 2 years ago

This is definitely a polish/papercut thing rather than something direly necessary. But I believe that specifically because pw-viz is a very simple application at heart, it should also be approachable enough that a primary schooler who just learned to read knows how to use it from the moment they first see it. Many less savvy people are afraid of messing things up by experimenting so they will hesitate to guess controls. Often they won't think of sifting through the menus in search of information either.

Linux applications are infamous for being power user -oriented and hard to approach for others. The Rust community has an amazing culture of doing things The Right Way and with PipeWire already being a huge improvement to Linux audio both in terms of usability and functionality, I would love to see the utilities in the overlapping space adopting a culture of being easy enough to use that no tutorials are needed for them.

A simple info bar isn't really so disruptive as to slow down power users so they aren't hurt by having one. And if someone does heavily dislike it, they most likely are savvy enough to find a toggle option in the menu.

TL;DR: very low hanging fruit for great user friendliness, sorry if the wall of text sounds preachy