[FR] `?` help dialog

[huyz]

Would be nice to have a help pop-up window when I hit ?. The bottom menu doesn't contain keybindings such as ⬅️ and ↩. It took me a while to figure out how to expand/collapse an individual item without the mouse.

[xavierog]

It is true that some keybindings may not be that intuitive. Plus, a help pop-up window is quite standard in TUIs and should be relatively easy to implement.

[xavierog]

@huyz Here is a first draft, straight from my working directory:

Comments, suggestions?

[huyz]

@xavierog looks perfect to me. Didn't know about tab!

[xavierog]

@xavierog looks perfect to me. Didn't know about tab!

Thanks for your feedback. I also intend to revamp the quit dialog:

Before:

After:

[huyz]

Yeah that's better.

I would leave Do not quit as a a default color, e.g. gray, as it's for a reversal of user intent and should thus be a rare occurrence and shouldn't grab so much attention.

[xavierog]

I'll think about it. My initial intent was to use a traffic light pattern to reflect the level of safety inherent to each option:

• not quitting is the safest option as it involves no data loss whatsoever, hence the green color.
• terminating the process is potentially dangerous depending on what it does, how it was designed and how it was implemented, hence the red color.
• quitting and leaving the process untouched is a gentler option, hence the orange color.

[huyz]

IMHO, the traffic light pattern further confuses. "Green" means "go"—i.e., go with my original intent. Which isn't what we'd want to convey

[xavierog]

That makes sense.

[xavierog]

The help dialog and the revamped quit dialog are available as of Moulti v1.13.0, released on 2024-07-21.

[xavierog]

FYI, Textual 0.77 introduces a help panel that is slightly different (it appears on the right side, not in the middle) but is also context-aware and exhaustive. I think it is worth switching from the help dialog discussed here to that new help panel.