Bug #3498: Preference categories not showing up if specific workbench has not been visited

[bejant]

Visual Studio does it. see here.
LabVIEW does it. see here.
IB Trader Workstation ("TWS") does it. see here.
LibreOffice does it. see here.

Most of those are industry tools with more bells and whistles than FreeCAD. (None of them have this quirky behavior, btw.)

To me those examples look like the equivalent of Tools > Edit Parameters in FreeCAD but with more of those bells and whistles...

[NormandC]

The question is: would it be possible to list all installed/enabled workbenches in the Preferences dialog, but only load them when you click on one in the sidebar? I guess it may require a code rewrite...

Besides, anybody else thinks that the icons are too big? It was fine years ago when there were no more than 3 or 4 workbenches, but now the list is rather long.

[chrisb]

Besides, anybody else thinks that the icons are too big? It was fine years ago when there were no more than 3 or 4 workbenches, but now the list is rather long.

+1

[bejant]

Besides, anybody else thinks that the icons are too big?

Yes. I don't need them to be so large in order for me to recognize them, so I'd like to be able to control their size (as we can do with the toolbar icons).

[Xunie]

Xunie, of course we all appreciate a nice UI for the preferences dialog. And noone objects that it would be nice to optimize things here. However, it works pretty well - though not perfect - the way it is. And it is nothing you have to change multiple times while building a model. Improving it the way you want is probably much more than just polishing, it requires some architectural changes.

You're right: reworking major parts of the backend for the sake of the UI is crazy talk.

So it works "pretty well - though not perfect"? If it worked pretty well, I wouldn't have had to scour google, ask people on IRC and eventually discover this behavior myself by making a bug report and bothering people in a forum thread. This is the epitome of bad UX and unintuitive behavior.

The only solution I see now is this: put a warning in small text at the top of the window that says: "Settings for workbenches may be invisible if the workbenches haven't been used. Close the settings, cycle through the workbenches for which you want to edit settings and return here."

Does anyone have a better solution than that?

Besides, anybody else thinks that the icons are too big?

Yes. I don't need them to be so large in order for me to recognize them, so I'd like to be able to control their size (as we can do with the toolbar icons).

I concur with icon sizes being too big.

[sgrogan]

Does anyone have a better solution than that?

See here: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=38571
and here: https://github.com/triplus/Autoload/tre ... 472deb12ae

[chennes]

I've implemented a very simple (sub-optimal-but-better-than-nothing) approach based on this discussion, and posted about it in a recent technical discussion of the eventual "correct" handling here:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 88#p459688