Subject:ambigous selection Author:Roedy Green Date:25 Jan 2010 09:09 AM
I manually indented approximately 200 files and discovered after I was done that 84% of them did not take. What happened?
Stylus has a quite elaborate way of marking the selected file to edit.
It will highlight it at least seven different ways:
1. unhighlighted
2. grey highlight
3. yellow background with full URL
4. yellow background with short name.
5. blue background with full URL
6. blue background with short name.
7. blue tab on corresponding window goes bold and comes to front.
Sometimes the project panel selection and the tab panel select are out of sync. It seem as though you are supposed to double click, but when you do it often slaps you on the wrist, saying you have already made the selection.
I discovered that my F2 shortcut to invoke Edit-Indent is sensitive to the kind of highlight. Further it does not work when the edit window has focus. The menu command Edit-Indent is not so fussy.
There is no indication the keystroke command is being ignored.
Further, I found Stylus sometimes goes into a snit, and it ignores F2 no matter WHAT type of highlight there
Just try bulk reformatting 200 documents and see what percentage success you get. You will see what I mean.
My feature requests are:
1. Rethink your highlighting so that is more obvious to the user what the active document is. Make it easier to rapidly select a new active document, preferably by keystroke only.
2. if a keystroke shortcut is not valid for some context, complain.
3. Don't chastise me for reselecting the same item. I am just making sure it took.
4. There should always be a right-click alternative to double click. Double click can too easily be mistaken as two clicks or a single click.
5. As a general principle, the screen should change in some way to acknowledge each keystroke or mouse click.