[Libreoffice] Why BLK selection mode? (was: Re: LO status bar annoyances)

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi *,

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 12:15 AM, Christoph Noack <christoph at dogmatux.com> wrote:
> [...]
>
>> BLK selects (roughly) rectangular blocks (is this useful for anything?)
>
> Concerning the usefulness ... as far as I remember (I had a talk with
> Frank Loehmann, the UX guy, who worked on that feature a few years ago),
> it has been introduced to improve working with e.g. "fake tables" being
> made of tabs, or working with imported data which is formatted with mono
> spaced fonts.

Well - it has been one of the most longstanding issues, filed back in
2001 - thankfully people behaved in the issue and kept the "I need
this!!!" comments to a minimum, but I remember this one being
requested over and over again, on the mailinglists and on exhibitions.
"Word can do it, I'm used to it".
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1596
I myself always found Text to Table more useful...

So definitely do not remove that feature.

Also don't remove stuff from the statusbar based on "I don't need it,
so it must be useless" style argumentation.

I don't hate things more than useless statusbars. I love chromium
browser for not having one. The other browser's statusbars never did
provide any useful information, so I fully agree with Thorsten in
"waste of screen estate". But Writer's statusbar displays useful stuff
as well. So unless you remove all of it to make it obsolete, you don't
gain anything by removing indicators. You just make it less useful.

I also disagree about the zoom-percentage: Please keep it. I hate it
in other apps when I don't see what factor a setting corresponds to.
having it "snap" at 100% is not a replacement.

ciao
Christian