Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/Special characters/reply (4)

Thanks for this, it's really helpful – some replies.

"Change the "<" to an "X""

As you say, this is a consistent design for all inspectors; I agree that it's worth looking at this again.

"Moving the dialog like a window"

This is quite a lot of work (and yes, if we wrote this functionality it would also be something we build for all inspectors and dialogs). Would this be more valuable than (say) TheDJ's suggestion of it appearing as a hovering block at the bottom of the window (in the same way but the opposite end of the view to the toolbar)?

"The dialog is too vertically lengthy"

We can very easily make it only sized to the window (maybe with a minimum height, like we do for dialogs). Should the page scroll down so that you get to see enough of the dialog, too? Right now we don't do this for inspectors, but it might make them a bit easier to use when your cursor is at the bottom of the page.

"Change the sections into tabs"

The problem here is that the sections are defined by local communities; what would we do if there were 10 sections? 20? 50?

"Add a search bar to the dialog"

This could turn what should be a quite simple and quick to use interface into something that's very "heavy", and I think it'd only be useful for a minority of characters, and only to some users who already know that they're looking for an "a"-related character (for example, would you expect "α", "א", "æ" and "ɐ" to show up when you typed in "a"?). Would it be better if we had some way of organising the characters so that all the As were clustered together in each section, like was suggested here?

"Organize the buttons into a proper, aligned grid"

This could be very helpful, yes – I'd note that the WikiEditor's special character panel uses this approach, to its credit. Do you think that we should hard-code a maximum width and show buttons with labels centred regardless of their actual width, or should the width of the buttons on screen alter as the widest character currently shown gets wider or narrower? I think the first option is probably better, but it's not a great choice to need to make. Note that users' browsers/system/font selection (amongst other issues) can make it unpredictable how wide this will be (and indeed which character is widest), which may be a little confusing.