Sublime Forum

User interface suggestions

#1

I put together an interactive UI mock-up comprising some ideas for simplifying/updating the overall ST user interface:

hansifer.github.io/sublimeTextUIProposal/

Feedback welcome.

Cheers,
Hans

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#2

I know that a picture says more than a thousand words, but could you please add a few words as well to elaborate on what you mean?

I understand the path bar, and that is something I’d like to see as well. The side bar, status bar, and mini map looks just like the existing ones, or am I missing something? Putting the menu bar inside the window breaks the UI guidelines for all platforms so I don’t agree with that.

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#3

I see what you mean. I’ll add more info. In the meantime, can you provide references to the “UI guidelines for all platforms” that you’re referring to?

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#4

The obvious difference is moving the tabs to the top, but overall I was trying to come up with something visually simpler and more cohesive that makes better use of real-estate, mostly by adjusting the placement and visual parity of the different UI areas and eliminating as many non-practical visual elements as possible. Currently (in Windows at least), the status bar, menu bar, side bar, title bar, and tabs/content areas each have a distinct style.

The UI is already very good and much better than any other editor/IDE I’ve seen, but it could be even better with a few relatively subtle visual adjustments that have a big impact on UX IMO. Granted, these adjustments do not necessarily translate into a correspondingly subtle implementation effort, so even if there WERE an interest from ST to improve the application’s UX, I’m not pinning my hopes on that happening.

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#5

I personally like the Side Bar but I’m not a big fan of the menu because Ubuntu and Mac have this build in in the Global Menu bar.
But for operating systems like Windows this could be a nice feature.
And if you want the file path you can just right click the file and copy it so I do not see a need for that.

But other than it is a nice new UI look :smile:.

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#6

Agreed. I failed to mention that my intention is not to force a window-level menu bar in OS’s that make use of a global menu bar. In those cases, that area could be used for other things (eg, the file path) or just permanently hidden.

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#7

Ok than I completely like this idea for the UI :smile:.
I hope jps will see this and take inspiration of this :wink:.

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#8

Can you please add a side pannel with all snippets, so I can just click on them to insert? I’m using Komodo Edit now just because of this feature, but it’s very glitchy and I would definitely switch to Sublime Text if you add this feature too. It looks like this in Komodo:

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#9

Don’t really see the need for a snippets sidebar. You can easily and quickly add snippets into your documents using the Command Palette (Shift+Command+P) and due to fussy searching you can find the snippet you want rather fast, as opposed to digging for them through folders on a sidebar.

With regards to the user interface, I would like to see Sublime implement the tabs in the same way that Chrome does it, I think it would make Sublime look sleeker and the custom themes would also be able to encompass the whole UI, like in Chrome.

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#10

I like the tabs, but I don’t like that the sidebar inherits the tint colour.

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#11

You call this fast?? With opened sidebar I can just doubleclick on snippet, I don’t have to type anything. And I can also select some text, click on snippet and selected text will jump inside of snippet text on set position. This is how snippets should be - easy to use and fast to reach.

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#12

Absolutely. Say you named your snippet “analytics” (for the Google Analytics code), just you hit shift+command+p, type “sni ana” press enter and boom, you have your snippet with the cursor placed whenever you defined inside your snippet code. Thanks to fuzzy searching you don’t need to type the whole name, usually the first three letters are enough.

With this method, I don’t have to reach for the mouse, have a sidebar open taking up screen real state, look for the desired item in a list (even scrolling if necessary) and double clicking it. Using the command palette is a faster and less complex process overall.

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