KDE 4.2 Toolbars: Icons + Labels
As mentioned back in the Kubuntu Intrepid Alpha 5 testing stage, one of the changes we made for the most recent release was adjusting the toolbar icon label and placement from being icon-only or label under icon to be label next to icon. The previously mentioned blog entry has more information on why.
This default change affects most applications, but not necessarily all. For example, Konqueror still has icons only, but Dolphin has icons + labels. Currently Kmail has icons + labels, but would probably be better if it was icons only. We came up with some recommendations in the Intrepid release which could be further refined for all of KDE.
We haven’t heard any comments about this change, so I’m assuming:
- people like the change (great!)
- no one has noticed the change (also good)
- no one minds the change (good)
- no one has been bothered enough by the change to complain (less than good but not bad)
It would be useful to have a way to detect small form factors (such as the Eee or N810) so the option can be adjusted appropriately. Labels next to icons makes sense for normal sized monitors and resolutions, but screen real estate is much more valuable in sub- and micro-devices — icons-only would be the best solution in those cases.
Nuno is ready to push this as default for 4.2. However, before that is done, the global option will need to be tested in all the apps to find any toolbars which do not obey it. There are a few applications which do not obey the global option change, or only half of the toolbars obey the option while the other toolbars do something different. This testing and fixing needs to be done regardless of which icon/label option is default and testers are welcome.
Hi! I don’t want to discourage you guys because you are doing a great job both in kde and kubuntu but I think putting the the text next to icons in toolbars is a bad idea even for large screens. My personal taste is to have no text at all and let the tooltip do the label’s job. Then again, you can always pose the question of discoverability. Having the text under the icons doesn’t take as much space as having it next to the icons and solves that problem. The only reason I didn’t give any feedback before is that I didn’t notice the change in the default. I always got no text throughout Intrepid’s development stages. I guess that it is also because it is way too easy to change that default so users don’t even notice that it happened globaly in the distro. Anyway, thanks for the effort.
I’ve been using text next to icons since the kde 4.0 betas and I like very much.
I think it would be great if it was the default for 4.2!
I used to use only icons in toolbars but after your post about the change for the Intrepid release I found toolbars with text alongside icons look really sexy.
For widescreens users also is great as you don’t waste vertical space.
For people like Luís who know what icons do and what he can do with toolbars, and probably has changed it already, it doesn’t matter, but for my mom or my girlfriend, having the text it’s the best idea, under or alongside it’s a matter of taste, but I think that text should appear in ‘netbooks’ as usually this are bought by people not used to GNU/Linux nor KDE.
Beside this, the Hide Menu bar option is also not available in all applications and maybe it should be a system wide setting so you can save space on small devices and show/hide it with a toolbar button.
Thanks to all the usability team as your contributions are really important to this project.
It is good change, thank you for that one!
Hi Celeste,
I think the setting should be enterily configurable: “icon only”, “text on the right”, “text below”, with icon only as default. I’d also like to have consistency among the apps, so every app looks the same.
My 2 cents :-)
I for one like the text next to icons change. It’s one of the cool KDE4 features because frankly I have never imagined it can be done like that :)
It’s great as default settings and it is very widesreen friendly.
I would really like to see some option to prioritize specific icons. Say Back and Fetch Mail, and have the option to only show high priority labels next to icons. Apart from this I prefer the Icon next to Text, however most of the time I have Icon only because the text takes to much space.
I think another effect of having text for only the high priority icons is that they get bigger, making it easier to hit.
I allready have removed all text besides icons …
But it would be great to have somewhere in system settings a checkbox to change it system wide in one time …
@Luis, Rodolf, PhilippeP: There is a global option in System Settings to change the label/icon display. This would simply be the default which can always be changed.
Well done friend…thank you………………………
Some random thoughts on this.
In KDE 3.5.x in Kubuntu, most of the applications normally used run fine with Icon only and tooltip. I see this as a problem for large organisation migrating to Kubuntu with KDE4 (but it can be changed globally, so not so bad).
Another drawback I see is when the text is very long (for example, in Akregator, where “download all feeds” takes a lot of space). I see this a potentiel problem, also with translations that can take more space then the original string (in French often for example).
I’m not sure what a normal user would gain to see so much text instead of simple buttons. Of course, buttons then have to mean something closely related to what they are doing :-)
I’m working on my day-to-day laptop with Kubuntu 8.10, but at home with Kubuntu 8.04/KDE3 , and I find that on a global perception of things, the label-next-to-icon have contributed to my perception of KDE applications looking less friendly then in KDE3 (the Oxygen theme may also contribute to this).
Maybe there is also a good solution for the font size / dpi problem with higher resolutions. I have with some notebooks with higher dpi too large font sizes by default. And so it looks ugly by default :(
Text under the icons is great for me. But as Benoit St-André said foreign language tends be longer than English, this may be a problem small form factor device. So I thinks that Icon only and tooltip should be the default setting.
I would rather avoid those long entries due to text or at least have it easily parameterizable by the user herself.
Regarding eeePC, I have got a 701 where Kubuntu is not running since an update in July and where 8.10 also is not running due to some mysterious graphical issue, I always hade the bar with minumum icons but located ON THE LEFT SIDE.
Now I installed Ubuntu 8.10 and repeated the same manoeuver, getting the best fit to use a wido-and-not-tall screen.
( My desktop under 1680×1050 has got also the bar on the left side with Kubuntu 8.04, I do believe it is the best solution for 16×10 or 16×9 surfaces).
I liked the Text under Icons more because Text alongside Icons wastes way too much space and is less sexier! :)
Obviously that’s just my opinion…
I think text beside icons takes up too much room if applied to every icon on the toolbar, but I quite like the approach Gnome takes with this option, where most buttons have no text, but certain important ones (e.g browser back button) have a label next to them. It means those important buttons are now bigger, easier to recognise, and easier to hit.
I hope that KDE4 gets new options for menus.
Few important features for _all_ KDE4 applicatios are:
1) Possibility to hide menu and have only a toolbar. This is especially important thing with netbooks when we have 1024×600 size screen or even smaller! All menu options should be possible to set as buttons for toolbar. The menu hiding could only be possible from right-click the toolbar or Ctrl+M shortcut.
/me waiting that Ctrl+M feature comes to Kmail (kontact) so it is possible to get ridd of the menu and get clean simple UI for email application. Especially when I dont use the menus more than few times a month with 1024×600 sized screen…
2) The option to choose what toolbar buttons has only a icon or icon + text. So not only icon + text or icon-only or text-only -modes. This would be set from toolbar customizing. Configure Toolbar > Current Actions -list would have [ ] or [X] for telling is the icon WITH or WITHOUT the text. or somekind other way.
This way we can add more important buttons to toolbar with text, and not so important but good-to-have buttons just with icons.
Example of KMail. We could have only a “Write” and “Check mail” buttons with text, so those two buttons would be bigger onces. And all other buttons would be with icon-only mode. They would take less space and would look better, wich means we could add more needed buttons to menu if wanted.
I would like to have for Konqueror “icon+text a side” buttons as “Back” “Forward” and “Reload” and all others just with icon. So the Kget would not have big “Download Manager” text taking space or the “print” button. And of course, I would place the “Go” button the text so it would be little bigger. This would just help customising the UI for better performance.
And other good features would be possibility to have same “space” as Firefox and Thunderbird. So we could get some buttons to right side or to left side.
So we would not be forced to have all buttons on left side but they could be on middle or right side too if wanted.
You are doing great job, but sometimes you should not be thinkin only the icons should they be by default in position A or B, but actually think how users could customize the UI as they want, so they can get better usability, because advanced users know how they like the UI be and some users cant even think about the application if UI is forced to work one way. ;-)
ps. I have reported two times these menu hiding and toolbar buttons+text wishes to BKO but both times someone has told that I should do them myself. So… mayby in few years if I get time to learn C++ etc, I will do them for me. :-D
Hi,
actually I think screens are not that big today.
The default display nowadays seems to be a 19 inch TFT with a resolution of 1280×1024, which us nice but not huge. Many current notebooks have 1280×800 resolution, and the 800 is really not much.
So I think having an option so KDE doesn’t use too much screen space is good. (this is something which I nowadays actually like in Windows classic style - it’s quite compact).
Alex
First, I love KDE4 and generally really like the way it looks. However, you can count me as another person who thinks that the text next to icons idea is a really bad idea. It takes up too much horizontal space and saves very little vertical space, meaning that the net gain is negative. Plus, you must move the mouse even farther to move between items, which is never good for usability. Also, is it confusing and messy because all of the buttons are different sizes and it can be distracting to figure out where each starts and ends.
I don’t really mind if this becomes the default in Kubuntu (I don’t use it) but please please please do not push this “feature” upstream. It is great to have the option there for people who like this setup, but the last thing we need is to present new users with a messy and confusing interface that requires more effort to use and does not fit properly on their screen.
However, these are just my opinions / observations, so feel free to ignore if you believe they are wrong.
Actually I prefer having small icons and no text everywhere. However in KDE 4.1.3 there are some problems with this:
- settings are sometimes reverted to defaults
- there is no way to centrally set this for all apps
- it looks really ugly in KDE4 since there is to much space around the icons
- some apps (Adept, can’t remember the others do not allow small icons at all)
Bugs are reported, but so far there is no activity on them, so I fear nothing will happen.
I can not test KDE4.2 for this. I had a look at compiling instructions in techbase, but they seemed to complicated for me.
Needed to do a small mockup to support my bad english explanation about the toolbar icons+text idea, where you can choose what buttons gets a text and which onces only a icon.
http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?image=konquerortoolbarmockupfak0.png
In the mockup, I have just “selected” Back, Forward, Refresh and Print buttons to have a text when choosing texts to be shown right clickin the toolbar
@Fri13: Konqueror is one of the applications that will be icons only (as mentioned in the article)
Matthias’ message on the plasma-devel mailing list has a good example of how this change would benefit a lot of long labels and translations. The text-under-icon approach creates huge buttons and irregular spacing between icons, where the text-next-to-icon approach makes it much easier to scan the toolbar at the cost of very little extra horizontal space.
Aaron also brings up a good point about how the current default (text-under-icons) creates two lines the eye has to scan for information, instead of the one which text-next-to-icon provides..
Instead of making such choices, why not add an option for text to be placed beside or under the icon based on whether or not alongside would fill the tool-bar. In the menu, it’d look like Menu->Text Position->Icons Only, Text Only, Text Alongside Options, Text Under Icons, Dynamic.
Hi, personaly I prefer just icons, because after hiding the menu, I get a slick and sexy Dolphin look, something compared to Mac Finder in aesthetics, but much more powerful and easy to use..
But what I want to say, it’s that discovery of the option that changes every toolbar systemwide is very hidden, and I took 10 months using KDE4 to discover it, when in Gnome was dead easy to find a option similar to this..
And it’s not only me, I counted at least 4 persons commenting on this blog that doesn’t know that this option exists too..
Maybe it would be better if when you change the toolbar for one application, you have a checkbox or some other control that applies this change systemwide. It would be fast to find and very easy too.
Does everyone realize that the toolbar text location is configurable and will remain configurable? It is configurable both by using the specific toolbar context menu or globally via System Settings>Style>Effects(tab).
What Celeste and Nuno are suggesting here is the default setting: Text Alongside Icons. You don’t like the default, you change it (it is KDE after all). I changed mine to Text Alongside Icons long ago. So I didn’t even notice Intrepid’s default. Needless to say I like this as the default. With vertical space already being taken up by the panel, on monitors where the vertical space is always less than the horizontal space, this makes sense. The one counter-argument that seemed reasonable is for windows that are horizontally smaller than they are vertically AND which have toolbar items that end up filling the entire window width.
Applications that insist on having sentence long descriptions for toolbar items should use Icons Only either way.
Oh, I don’t think it has been said NEARLY enough: Celeste THANK YOU SO MUCH for your contributions to KDE. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!
peace and much respect for your work!
Suggestion what I made, is not actually about the problem the current default settings what you have tweaking. Now we have four different ways to have toolbars.
1) Icons only
2) Icons Text alongside
3) Icons Text under
4) Text only
There are different situations where one of the 1-3 options is better than others.
Because they can depend from hardware (Monitor size and aspect ration), Window size and by user opinion. The last one is most problematic for usability. Because there is no usablitity expert who could make default configurations to fit for everyone. And because there is so many different opinions and situations, the one-way settings does not always work. So in bad usability choose, users are forced to use one setting by excuse that works most of the time better than others. No one can tell for user why they cant do things as they like and know, what would speed up their work process. And forcing them to “better usability situation” based the usability studies, would lower their own usability. The situation is littlebit like demanging England and Kenya to switch from left-side driving to right-side driving. Even that you would proof how much good reasons to do the switch, the switch would generate more problems in few years than keeping the old one. But you know all this ;-)
The mockup what I made, was not for konqueror, I just used it as example. It was for the fifth option. Michael “Dynamic” Howell suggested the “Dynamic” option.
I like it. What if the fifth option would be the one what I suggested? What was that you can choose what icons has text and what does not? This way user could save space of toolbar buttons and especially make better usability by themself. Even you could make better default toolbars, because you could add all the needed buttons to toolbars but still choose to have text for such buttons what are most important to give the text information. Default settings would force toolbars to be icons-only, text-only or text+icon -modes.
I can find many problems by the configuration window and the “fifth idea”, but so can I find as many problems from current configuration possibilities, and I bet you know all of them already. And many of those problems causing only the 1-4th options could be fixed by making the “fifth” option, what would not make more problems for the other 1-4 options.
As far I have noticed, the best usability does not come from usability experts, but from the users itself. I work a lot with old people, some have very little expercience from computers, most not at all. And currently the settings what are placed by default or given the options to change settings, they ain’t enough.
When you sit down with 70-75 yeard old man or woman, they are waiting one thing…. the most important…
They want the machine to adapt to them. They dont want adapt themselfs for the machine. Thats why Windows or GNOME are very dificult to use many old people, because no one can configurate the UI for them.
KDE is in special situation, because we can choose what buttons to have on toolbar, do we want to have a menu or not and how to move the toolbars. The key for best usability is the configuration options. If old aged user wants only learn sending emails for his childrends, why he is forced to have all kind buttons and menus in the email window if he is never going to use them? Why would usability experts want to stop users getting a UI for such that the usage is more dificult without customising? (This is now littlebit a case with Kmail too because user cant hide the menu etc.)
Usability experts mots important work is to build as good _default_ UI, as possible. And then just compromising the other settings etc such way that you can have configurations, with good usability. What might be the most hardest part. How to hide thousand-and-one -options behind simple UI :-D.
And like this default icons-text question what you wrote, it is just a good example for thinking the default settings for users who do not want/know to tweak the configurations. Because problem is that they dont know what they want. Thats why with old people it is someway… a little different, because they know far often what they want. They know their limits and they dont usually even want to learn anymore new stuff, just do what they want. Young minded seems to more often do adapt to new situations like “Ah… it is done this way.. okay…” while old minded asks “Why this must be so dificult?”.
The Aaron post about text under icons is valid. I have noticed same thing and I like to have “Text under icons” option when using my 24″ 1920×1200 screen or 17-19″ 1280×1024 screens. But for my laptop (1280×800) I use icons only, because screen size is too small and for netbooks I use icons only too. But for me I dont have such problems with these, because I have learned what the icons does and I usually use shortcuts more often. But for all my family members who has netbooks (and who use KDE), few of them dont understand the icons meaning, because they need to be so small because screensize. And text would be very important information for few buttons, but not for all, because you have screensize problem again. So they are forced to use the current options what ain’t enough. Even the Microsoft has found this that some buttons needs the text and some buttons can be left without.
This seems to be the best change KDE4 even had. IMO this should be the default setting from KDE 4.0, the ‘text under icon’ option is simply a no-go for me since it takes way too much screen real-estate. (we’ve got 800 pixels height on a typical 14′ notebook and we need space for status bar, menu, window border, and all kind of stuffs we must reduce the height of a button to minimum)
Text-only is actually a good option for some language because a descriptive text in the particular language may even be smaller than an icon.
Personally, I would like a ’selective text to the right’ option, i.e. some icons got text and some icons do not.
Count me in the “did not notice” category. I knew that everything looked good, but I didn’t notice the change until I read your post, then started examining. I like it. This new setup just felt right to me. Isn’t that what good usability strives for?
having always text alongside icons looks realy realy ugly nor is it usable, especially for non-english languages. what about dynamicly switching between ‘text beside icons’ and ‘icons only’ depending on space and priority of icons? so when resizing your window-size icons and text fits best in available horizontable space.
Must just say I love the new default, especially on my wide-screen netbook (EeePC 901).
I did have a small problem with Kmail having to many icons once I had configured a spam filter (adding a spam and a ham button), but after nuking a few of the less used icons I’m all good.
text alongside icons is not a good idea for me. like the above poster said, the net gain is negative. it takes too much horizontal space while gaining very little vertical space and you have to move with extra mile to get to the other buttons on the tool bar. plus, it’s very ugly to look at. text under icons is sexy. icons only is sexier.. sometimes it’s not good to consider very little usability issues and forbid art/sexiness..