LibreOffice Is Working On Redoing Their Toolbar Layout

[schmidtbag]

They added the sidebar toolviews in 5.0 that are basically exactly a vertical ribbon.

I use them pretty much exclusively and think they are much better than either approach. I got rid of the horizontal toolbars in favor of those toolboxes.

That feature has actually been around long before 5.0. I've been using it for a while myself, but it is very lacking. It isn't an effective replacement to the classic toolbar.

[darkcoder]

Hummm... copying a design that is already known to have an interface not optimized for the touch devices of today, and that sooner or later that M$ company will change it.

[sheldonl]

I'm personally a fan of the ribbon bar, I just think it's stupid for it to be laid out horizontally. With screen resolutions getting as big as they are today, there is so much wasted horizontal space where the actual document is. Setting up a vertical ribbon bar would really take advantage of screen real-estate.

That's actually not as good and idea as it seems once you think about it. If you need to see more of your document, best to use that horizontal realestate to see more than one page than try to squeeze in one or two more lines of text by reducing that ribbon to a toolbar (which space wise there is not a huge difference.) If you put the toolbars/ribbons vertical on one side you destroy the ability to do that.

[CrvenaZvezda]

I absolutely HATE the ribbon bar. I would rather have LibreOffice-developers look to KDE for a GUI that is form factor adaptable.

[GreatEmerald]

Yeap, I'm not a fan of the ribbon at all. Personally I only ever use a few buttons often enough to warrant a button, and the toolbar configuration is nice enough to allow removing all the useless cruft and leave only one row of stuff I actually need. Everything else is best off being in menus.

[zeos]

I hope it stays optional, as in not the default. I have been recommending libreoffice for years to people who hate the ribbon interface.

[You-]

They added the sidebar toolviews in 5.0 that are basically exactly a vertical ribbon.

I use them pretty much exclusively and think they are much better than either approach. I got rid of the horizontal toolbars in favor of those toolboxes.

Reading the wiki, they are using this same sidebar, cleaning it up a bit (moving to glade files for the UI), and then using them for both alternatives- the sidebar or the tabs at the top.

[bemerk]

I like that they offer people more choices. If you don't like it you are not forced to use it.

[Remdul]

Only as long as it remains optional, I'm ok with this. And as long as the UI is intuitively structured and consistent, so users aren't trained to become too accepting of other modern insane UI design thrash.

I personally hate the ribbon (less intuitive than traditional menus and toolbars), but this does make LibreOffice easier migrate to for ex-MS office users. Remember, the only reason ppl 'like' the MS ribbon UI is because they never had a choice. I think, over time, they'll eventually move back to traditional interfaces, because there was nothing wrong with it in the first place (with 50+ years of GUI design evolution that it was the result of).

I'm not to worried about unused screen space, at modern display resolutions that's becoming less and less important. Todays 'UX' designers (god I hate that phrase) are striving for two opposites, hence their schizophrenic products. One example is the the beheaded/merged menu/title bar in OSX (but also Ubuntu). It utterly destroys the tried and trusted, inherently intuitive window system concept: hierarchical containment of windows and controls. Supposedly this revolution was necessary to reclaim wasted screen estate. Except that I've rarely seen an OSX user maximize their windows (just google for screenshots); indeed some applications are not even maximizable (and require manual resize by grabbing window borders). And then of course, if they didn't quadruple the icons size to 128x128px, they wouldn't have needed to sacrifice that extra screen space...

Merged menu bars, ribbons, parallax scrolling. What a joke the world of user interface design has become. Why do UX designers hate the end-user so much? I'm so glad Linux Mint came along or I wouldn't have an OS to run on my computers.

[/rant]

Anyway, I'm afraid that this new interface becomes default at some point, and later the old interface will be removed. Feeling very conflicted about this.

[Daktyl198]

Remdul As somebody who's used Linux and LibreOffice for over 5-6 years, the MS Office Ribbon is way WAY better than LibreOffice's interface. LibreOffice's interface isn't even as good as 2007 MS Office, honestly.