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sagemathinc / cocalc

CoCalc: Collaborative Calculation in the Cloud
https://CoCalc.com
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Request to remove "are you sure??" confirmation dialogues from two common buttons #4886

Open divilian opened 4 years ago

divilian commented 4 years ago

When you're a teacher grading lots of labs, you need to conserve mouse clicks as much as possible. (What simply takes "one extra mouse click" may actually be multiplied by a thousand if you've got a lot of students.)

Two buttons that help save me time are the "Halt" and "Validate" buttons on the Jupyter Notebook. Each one, however, requires me to click through an "are you sure?" dialogue, which limits most of their usefulness. I'd argue that a confirmation is not needed/wanted there.

For "Validate," the only thing you're confirming is that you want to restart the kernel and run the code. The warning text, which communicates "Oh my gosh -- you're about to run your code! Are you absolutely sure you want to do this??" seems out of place. There's never been a single time in all my semesters of using CoCalc when I would want to be stopped before I did that, since it's a non-destructive operation.

Similarly, for "Halt," you're simply confirming that you want to stop the kernel (no big deal) and close the Notebook with all changes already saved (again, no big deal).

Even without regards to the extra-mouse-click-is-a-pain issue, I'd argue that crying wolf with these two confirmations contributes to "confirmation fatigue" on the user's part, which may lead them to blow past a useful confirmation later on.

haraldschilly commented 4 years ago

Ok, I have an idea: what if we slightly enhance all such confirmation boxes to bypass their "popup dialog" if you hold the shift key?

That's one idea I had for restarting a project, which I frequently do as well. It would apply for your situation as well.

divilian commented 4 years ago

That's an improvement on current behavior. Even better would be a check box on the dialog box that said "Continue to show this warning in future," which I could uncheck and then be good forever, but I'm admittedly a beggar not a chooser.

williamstein commented 4 years ago

Even better would be a check box on the dialog box that said "Continue to show this warning in future,"

I like that. There would be a section in account prefs listing all of these and their state, so you could turn the warning back on later if you want, or disable all warnings.

williamstein commented 4 years ago

Also, shift+click doesn't make sense on tablets/mobile, whereas a checkbox to disable the warning would work on any type of device...