Here is some advice for better UI, in my opinion.

[123385918]

[dalthviz]

Hi @123385918 I transferred your issue from the main repo of Spyder to this one (that we are using to keep track of UX/UI improvements for Spyder 5). If you have more ideas or thoughts you can create a issue here to be discussed.

In terms of your suggestions I think there are some elements to clarify and maybe others that actually could be worthy to discuss:

• The labels you mention are actually the tabs to change from pane to pane so I think that is not a viable change.

• In terms of the path being displayed, I think it is helpful since you can compare the current file path with the path of other files by hovering them (but that probably is more like a way to use the info available).

• Checking the buttons that are duplicated, I think they are there since some people don't use shortcuts much but they use some actions quite often (for example the Remove all variables in the IPython Console).

• About the hamburger menu and the context menu with the same options, I think that could be worthy to explore. Checking a little bit, I think that behavior only happens in some of the panes (Editor and IPython Console) because they use a tab manager but maybe that behavior actually brings some inconsistency to the UI (the idea of having the hamburger menu is for all the panes to be visually consistent and store their main actions there):

Also, just in case, ping @juanis2112 and @isabela-pf since maybe they have more feedback to give :)

[123385918]

thanks for your response! i'm just a DataAnalysist and maybe not professional about UI. my advise comes from my experience with Spyder for 2 years.

in my opinion, if some info is temporary and unfrequently used, it should not present all the time. The path on the top of Editer is what i mean [HaHaHa]. We have so many ways to compare paths, but this function is not unfrequently used, so i don't think it should present all the time. And you can find that the Editor can't align with any pane horizontally just because the path show!

About the buttons on the top-right in each pane, such as [the Remove all variables] in the IPython Console, i think it can be acceptble to put them in menu (the menu when you right-click the label such as Console 1/A). Anyway these buttons are not used very frequently(if they are, shortcuts comes more efficent). Of course it's my opinion.

labels(e.g. Editor) and labels(e.g. base.py, config.ini) maybe can merge together becuase they're so duplicated functionally. Maybe it's not viable as you said.

Here is my ideal situation： it refers to Jupyterlab ,you can see.

i hope it can help Spyder5 to be more efficent and cool!

[isabela-pf]

Hi @123385918, and thanks for the feedback! It's great to hear from people using Spyder regularly. Here’s some of my thoughts on what’s been discussed.

• I’ve met with some members of Spyder’s team and we’ve talking about reviewing what’s in pane toolbars for Spyder 5 and making sure there aren’t duplicates of buttons and menu option where there shouldn’t be. In particular, I’ve listed places where in a single pane the same button is both an icon in the toolbar and in the menu on the right because these are places I want to fix. I’ll make sure that what you’ve pointed out gets on that list.

• As @dalthviz said, the labels you mentioned are used to change which pane is visible in that space we are planning to have them stay where they are. But the fact that it wasn’t clear to you what they do besides list the pane’s name is really important to hear. I’ve started working on ideas to make the UI differentiate from tabs on the top of panes (to help make it look more like a different type of interaction) at #4. Feel free to check out those ideas and comment there if you want.

• You’re also right that there are shortcuts for a lot of these things, but it’s usually a good idea to have ways to access features besides shortcuts, too. Especially since a user might not find a shortcut and might think that feature simply doesn’t exist in Spyder.

• What goes as an icon in the toolbar definitely should be used more frequently than content that goes to the menu, so you’re thoughts make sense. I’d have to look into the frequency of the specific buttons you’re mentioning, though.

• I haven’t looked into why the file path is in two places in the editor, but I will now.

Thanks again for pointing this out and giving me a chance to hear what you think!

[ccordoba12]

Here is my ideal situation： it refers to Jupyterlab ,you can see.

I think that's the main issue here, i.e. JupyterLab doesn't offer as much configurability and functionality as Spyder, so their interface can organized in a simpler layout.

Besides, it's kind of confusing in JupyterLab to have in the same tab for a single view objects with totally different functionalities. Here you can see (for instance) a notebook, a launcher and an html page all in the same tab.

In our case we decided to have all plain text documents shown to the left in the editor, all consoles under the "IPython console" tab that you'd like to see removed, etc.