KDE Starts April By Landing KHamburgerMenu

[ngraham]

For me the problem with Hamburger Menus is I prefer smaller fonts for more screen space which makes their menu entries small and harder to use unless extra padding is added. Hamburger or regular menu, that's a problem for me.

My biggest issue with them is that I'm not a fan of hieroglyphics. Seems like outside of Open, Close, and Minimize that all bets are off. Open a new program and "Is that a magnifying glass or a search function?"; open another and "I think the plus means new, but new what? Nope. It expands the tool bar". Just gotta hope they have good tool tips...and having to hover over every hieroglyphic to learn what it does sucks. And then you change the theme and have all new glyphs to learn

Words might take more space but they make it more readily apparent what is going on. I wish I felt like writing all of this in emoji to better make that point.

I miss the old layouts that had options to turn the words on and off. Don't know about y'all, but I'd rather turn on the obnoxious training wheels than figure it out with trial by fire.

Icons-only buttons having low usability is a known problem, and we try to avoid them except for cases where the symbol is universally recognizable (e.g. trash icon for delete, floppy icon for save, magnifying glass icon for search, and, increasingly, three-bar icon for "menu of options"). In addition, icons-only buttons always have tooltips with explanatory text. And for all other actions, I always strongly encourage the use of text to disambiguate the icon.

And all of this only applies to buttons, of course. Menu items in KDE software have text, icons, and visible keyboard shortcuts.

Also, icons-only buttons in toolbars of QWidgets-based KDE apps do offer you the option to add text to buttons that lack it.

[Mez']

"This is helpful for those wanting to hide the main menubar for conserving vertical space,"

There's me thinking this is 2021 where screen size has vastly increased along with resolution and not 1995 where everyone was on 800 x 600 using a pokey 14 inch monitor. I want less clicks, not more.

And yet there are more laptops sold than desktops.
Most of these laptops are 16:9 or 16:10, and a good proportion are 13-14". Any vertical space gain (for those who could use these gains) seems like a win to me.

[Khrundel]

Lol. These guys have created so much mess with their xdg-decoration nonsense just to eventually go same way gnome goes. And still they've stopped halfway: instead of using wasted headerbar space they've created an optional menuless layout.

[Slartifartblast]

And yet there are more laptops sold than desktops.
Most of these laptops are 16:9 or 16:10, and a good proportion are 13-14". Any vertical space gain (for those who could use these gains) seems like a win to me.

And I bet most laptop owners use a second screen when they can probably in the 24-27 inch bracket or larger rather than the postage stamp screen it came with; monitors are a lot cheaper than they used to be. Besides it's much better for your eyes and less eye strain.

[ngraham]

Lol. These guys have created so much mess with their xdg-decoration nonsense just to eventually go same way gnome goes. And still they've stopped halfway: instead of using wasted headerbar space they've created an optional menuless layout.

xdg-decoration has nothing to do with this. The idea is to improve upon the limitations of GNOME's hamburger menu design. Ours teaches the user keyboard shortcuts; allows you to click-hold-release to select an item; isn't limited in size to the dimensions of the window itself; and doesn't create a pressure to remove functionality to avoid bloating up the menu.

[angrypie]

Had to look up this ISO mounting thing because dolphin-plugins doesn't come preinstalled in Fedora KDE.

[ngraham]

Had to look up this ISO mounting thing because dolphin-plugins doesn't come preinstalled in Fedora KDE.

Boooooo go bug them to do so! I hate it when these kinds of technically optional packages aren't installed by default by distros. It's a mess.

[verude]

Lol. These guys have created so much mess with their xdg-decoration nonsense just to eventually go same way gnome goes. And still they've stopped halfway: instead of using wasted headerbar space they've created an optional menuless layout.

"wasted" headerbar space (which ignores the fact that CSD is HUGE) can house the menubar if the user chooses to, so instead of having two bar, or one giant bar I haev goblalmenu enabled in my setup.

[Vistaus]

For me the problem with Hamburger Menus is I prefer smaller fonts for more screen space which makes their menu entries small and harder to use unless extra padding is added. Hamburger or regular menu, that's a problem for me.

My biggest issue with them is that I'm not a fan of hieroglyphics. Seems like outside of Open, Close, and Minimize that all bets are off. Open a new program and "Is that a magnifying glass or a search function?"; open another and "I think the plus means new, but new what? Nope. It expands the tool bar". Just gotta hope they have good tool tips...and having to hover over every hieroglyphic to learn what it does sucks. And then you change the theme and have all new glyphs to learn

Words might take more space but they make it more readily apparent what is going on. I wish I felt like writing all of this in emoji to better make that point.

I miss the old layouts that had options to turn the words on and off. Don't know about y'all, but I'd rather turn on the obnoxious training wheels than figure it out with trial by fire.

I agree. I like words better than pictures, but only words looks a little off to me, so words accompanied by pictures is my personal choice

[Vistaus]

Icons-only buttons having low usability is a known problem, and we try to avoid them except for cases where the symbol is universally recognizable (e.g. trash icon for delete, floppy icon for save, magnifying glass icon for search, and, increasingly, three-bar icon for "menu of options"). In addition, icons-only buttons always have tooltips with explanatory text. And for all other actions, I always strongly encourage the use of text to disambiguate the icon.

And all of this only applies to buttons, of course. Menu items in KDE software have text, icons, and visible keyboard shortcuts.

Also, icons-only buttons in toolbars of QWidgets-based KDE apps do offer you the option to add text to buttons that lack it.

But even general icons can lead to confusion. For example, in Vivaldi's built-in email client, there are two trash icons, one of them marked with an 'x' (which means "No spam"). It took me a couple of days before I hit the right trash icon because they look so similar (and the 'x' marking is ambiguous).