[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Mirek's visit in SUSE :-)

[Jean-Francois Nifenecker]

Le 26/05/2012 11:31, Stefan Knorr (Astron) a écrit :
>
> Right, so I've looked around a bit on the internets/in LibreOffice:
> * I found one page that claimed Overwrite mode had no practical use
> today, I didn't find any that listed any uses of it.
> * The only use case I can imagine is filling out order forms that are
> comprised of ASCII text only (with "...." as placeholders) – it's safe
> to say that no one does that any more since PDF's are reasonably easy
> to generate.
> * I've found enough pages that describe how utterly
> confusing/frustrating Overwrite mode is to many people, due to it
> being so easy to trigger
>
> * In Word 2007+ you need to enable the Ins key in the options before
> you can use it
> * Thunderbird/Firefox/Evolution/Google Docs/Apple Pages don't have any
> Overwrite mode at all
> * Gedit still has it (and it's turned on/off with Ins)
>
> * Shift-Ins currently does the same as Ctrl-V (paste) – so that
> particular accelerator won't work, but Ctrl-Ins isn't taken yet
> * As always, accelerators are configurable, so if anyone really needs
> Ins, they can just set it up this way
> * I noticed that unlike with the Selection modes there's no menu item
> for Overwrite mode... which is bad, because it also means that people
> won't notice when we've changed the accelerator.

Agreed with all of this. Overwrite mode is mostly a thing of the past. 
When people inadvertently press the Insert key, they feel rather annoyed.

>
> Conclusion:
> * I personally wouldn't mind seeing Overwrote mode go entirely,

+1

> * If we want to keep Overwrite mode alive, but without a status bar indicator:
> ##1 do it like MSO does it – add a preference that's turned off by default
> ##2 add a menu item "Overwrite mode" to the "Edit" menu, which would
> obviously mostly serve to advertise our new accelerator
> ** Mirek's proposal of a red caret seems very good to me if we go with
> either of the above two ways (but a red block would be even more
> descriptive methinks)

Dunno about the red thing wrt visually impaired people, but, at least, 
having a block caret is a good idea.

-- 
Jean-Francois Nifenecker, Bordeaux