I’m not sure if I can articulate this without sounding slightly crazy. But I guess that’s the tone of most of my posts, so here goes.
I have a moderately annoying recurring issue with using the resource/element/file trees. My trees are rather long, and require vertical scrolling of the page to get to the items further down.
With a scroll-wheel-equipped mouse, this is no problem at all. But on a laptop with a touchpad, it can be kind of tricky. If I’m working in the tree area, and need to scroll down, it is quite a chore* to scroll all the way over to the right side of the screen to get at the scroll bar.
On a typical web page, the way I get around this issue is to just use the arrow keys. As long as the focus is on the main/normal content area of the page (not in a form field, embedded video, etc), this works well.
The problem is, there isn’t much "main/normal content area" over near the tree column. Typically there is just a thin grey vertical strip between the tree column and the content area (which is mostly text fields - especially near the bottom, which is usually where the main textarea or RTE field is at).
If I can maneuver over and click on this narrow strip of "neutral zone", I can then use the arrow keys to scroll down.
However, often times I’ll fail to stick my landing, and either A) click too far to the right, in the textarea/RTE box (which merely causes a temporary annoyance ’cuz the down-arrow won’t scroll the page), or B) click too far to the left, just inside of the tree column... which ends up loading some random resource I didn’t want to load (D’OH!). That is particularly annoying when I’ve got unsaved work on the current resource & was looking to scroll down and do a Quick-Update on some other item.
As I’ve been writing this long, rambling description of my problem, I think maybe I’ve stumbled upon an elegant solution:
Rather than the current behavior of "a single-click anywhere in the tree column opens the nearest horizontally-adjacent item for editing", a more user-friendly (IMHO) approach would be
- a single-click anywhere in the tree column puts *focus* on the nearest horizontally-adjacent item *without* opening it for editing.
- Once focus is on an item in the tree, the arrow keys can then be used to scroll up or down within the tree (moving focus up or down the list).
- An additional click on an item that already has the focus opens that item for editing
Effectively I’m proposing that a single-click in the tree allows arrow scrolling, and a double-click is required to edit a file. Perhaps for convenience, single-click-to-edit could still work when clicking directly on the text of the item name (rather than in the block of fill-space).
Either that or a scrollbar on the resource tree when it extends beyond the viewable screen space... but that doesn’t seem nearly as elegant.
There you have it. My UI suggestion.
* I realize that having to make three horizontal swipes on a touchpad to reach the right-side scrollbar really does not qualify as a "chore". This is definitely a "First-World Problem"
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MODX Staff
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, went live without proper configuration and gave white screen of death when logging back into manager.
MODX Staff
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