Double clicking on an existing activity should start a new entry for that activity

[u451f]

tags: enhancement, UX

The old hamster-applet allowed to double click on an activity on the list. This would start a new activity, and copy everything from the activity clicked. This was super useful after having a break. I would just double click, and basically continue what I did before my break. It would be nice to have this behavior in hamster-time-tracker. And that would work regardless of the day on which the previous activity was saved.

[fantasai]

Totally agree, I appreciated such a fast way to restart an activity! Would be great to have that behavior back.

What you can do in the current system is highlight the item and then press the + sign. Two clicks, so less convenient, but better than retyping everything... Maybe that would be more obvious if we used Stop/Play button like you suggested in #635 but I still agree double-click to restart is better.

[sorniva]

Hopefully I am understanding this correctly, but how would someone edit an existing entry if this were enabled?

I double click on previous entries to add stuff into the notes/description section about what happened after I complete that entry.

[Human]

For those of us who switch between tasks often, double clicking an old entry, as in the previous Hamster version, is a very efficient way to do it.

[palves]

I'm a contractor who has been using hamster 1 for tracking my time for many years, and now that I finally upgraded to Fedora 32 (1), that old version seemingly no longer works. :-( I'm giving hamster 3 (2) a try, and this is one of the things that I immediately miss. I switch tasks very frequently throughout the day.

1 if anyone knows how to manage to run hamster 1 in newer distros, please shoot me a note. I'd super appreciate it. 2 thanks so much for keeping this alive!

[rhertzog]

FTR, if you use the GNOME Shell extension then you can also do that easily by clicking on the "Play" button next to a former activity in the list. I use that quite often too.

[palves]

FWIW, I'm a KDE user, so I don't think the gnome shell extension helps in my case.

*1 if anyone knows how to manage to run hamster 1 in newer distros, please shoot me a note. I'd super appreciate it.

FWIW, after trying hamster 3 for a bit and finding it was too much of a step back, I ended up installing the old hamster 1 in a docker container.

[GeraldJansen]

[aside] Just a note to mention that xfce4-hamster-plugin is also still alive (updated for xfce 4.16) and offers the same feature for XFCE users. Having said that, I personally just use Hamster 3 from the keyboard. Assigning Hamster to an application shortcut key makes it very convenient to bring up the overview window and close it off with Esc, without having it in your face all the time. An Up keystroke or two highlights a previous entry and Ctrl-R can be used to restart that activity. Admittedly, you need to hit Enter to accept the data in the edit window, and it would be nice to by-pass that, but still it is a very quick way to restart previous activities. The Left key moves to a previous day, which also makes it convenient to restart a task from yesterday or earlier. I know many prefer the mouse, but thought this was worth mentioning because many users coming from v1 probably don't discover the help page about keyboard shortcuts. [/aside]

[DirkHoffmann]

Double-click is opening the clicked entry for editing. I would not change that behaviour right now, as I am afraid it would break user practice. The alternative chosen by developers (in hamster desktop and extensions, apparently) is to click on play/add without selecting a previous task, which opens the dialog for a new activity.

[palves]

In old hamster 1.x (which I'm still using), double clicking the entry would restart the previous task without opening a dialog at all. So much more efficient. I want my time tracker to be out of the way as much as possible. Why not make this configurable instead of closing the issue?

BTW, I'd expect right-click -> context menu -> edit to be a more normal way to edit elements in a list. Maybe alternatively ctrl-click.

Anyhow, looks like I'll continue running hamster 1.x in a container.

[DirkHoffmann]

Thanks for your feedback, @palves.

I understand your concern. Probably I have never used 1.x, and I hope you will pass on to a newer version as well in a not to far future. You probably understand that the project cannot maintain old versions forever, and you may end up being on your own. I read your disappointing feedback on v3, but that must have been a very early version. Please try again and give feedback on 3.0.3, when you have the opportunity.

Regarding the implementation of the context menu with right click, would you be ready to contribute some code?

[matthijskooijman]

Maybe it would be good to generalize the request, to have some way to quickly restart an earlier activity. I assume that it does not necessarily need to be a double-click?

As for the double-click, I can see how that worked in Hamster 1.x, but given that double-clicking is now used for editing, I'm not in favor of changing it altogether. Making it configurable could work, but I suspect we could probably device a better UI that facilitates both.

For example, looking at the gnome shell extension, that shows simple buttons with each past activity, to allow editing or resuming that activity:

Maybe the shell extension could already be sufficient for your usecase (if you happen to use gnome), but I can imagine that a similar thing could work for Hamster's own overview window as well. If you have both an "edit" and "resume" button, then I guess making the double-click configurable as a shortcut to either of those would also again make sense :-)

[DirkHoffmann]

OK for your proposal, @matthijskooijman. Just this point:

Maybe the shell extension could already be sufficient for your usecase (if you happen to use gnome), but I can imagine that a similar thing could work for Hamster's own overview window as well.

I think it would be confusing, if same actions (like double-click) had a different effect on different user interfaces.