[Libreoffice] LO status bar annoyances

[Kohei Yoshida]

Hi Sebastian,

On Tue, 2010-11-30 at 11:26 +0100, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:

> - What annoys me most is the "document modified indicator". If it is
>   unmodified, I see some *empty* separators in the status bar (why do we
>   show empty separators? these should GO GO GO away) and the mouse
>   tooltip over the *empty* separator says "this document has not been
>   modified". When I type, I get a document with an exclamation mark, and
>   the tooltip changes to "this document has been modified".
> 
>   a) This is  the standard state of my documents (see,  I tend to modify
>      docs in  a editor,  DOH), and that  exclamation mark  purports some
>      sense of urgency and failure.
> 
>   b) We warn when closing a modified doc anyway, so there is no need to
>      always warn me and use up precious space. I propose to just do away
>      with it.

Sorry I have to disagree there.  I'm the one who put that icon there,
and the reason for that was to have a visually obvious way to tell
whether or not the document is currently modified.  A lot of people were
using the save icon status for that purpose, but some users (including
myself) also didn't like the fact that you can't always save the
document especially when the app *thinks* it's not modified (note: there
are times when the document is marked unmodified, but some data are
modified such as the cursor position, zoom level etc.).

In response to this, LibreOffice provides a configuration option to
allow users to be able to always save the current document.  Turning on
this option, however, leaves the save icon always enabled (and
rightfully so), which to those users who were using it to see the
document modified status takes away that visual clue.  Hence the
document modified status icon on the status bar was placed as a
replacement.  Some of us even think that we should turn on this option
by default.  Currently it's off by default.

So, that's the background on this indicator.  I'm afraid we can't remove
this unless there is really really good reason to do so. ;-)

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida at novell.com>