But one of the few things I really dislike on most gnome-apps (perhaps it is something covered in one of the usability guidelines) are uncostumizable toolbars. I really like to customize my toolbars (like I do in OpenOffice.org), and add the buttons I feel I need to use more often. Particularly, I would put mostly all formatting things in Tomboy notes’ toolbar, as I use a good-sized monitor and nearly NEVER write short notes (or even paragraphs as you can see here).

Fun

But one of the few things I really dislike on most gnome-apps (perhaps it is something covered in one of the usability guidelines) are uncostumizable toolbars. I really like to customize my toolbars (like I do in OpenOffice.org), and add the buttons I feel I need to use more often. Particularly, I would put mostly all formatting things in Tomboy notes’ toolbar, as I use a good-sized monitor and nearly NEVER write short notes (or even paragraphs as you can see here).

Fun

I’m not fond of it, actually, mostly because the ‘+’/'-’ is not normally used to show/hide toolbars, so it’s inconsistent with the rest of the Gnome UI.

What might make more sense is a drop-down button-menu that would show the Italic/Bold/Underline/etc. buttons. Normally you would expect these to be used via keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+B, etc.), so the added button click shouldn’t be a major hindrance for reasonably advanced users.

Alternatively, (slightly) rethink the whole concept.

Instead of two buttons for font-size increase/decrease, have a drop-down list of potential font sizes. Instead of 4 buttons for bold/italic/underline/strike-through, have a drop-down grid (like Gnumeric’s foreground/background color selection widget) that shows all 16 combinations of bold/italic/underline/strike-through in combination:

[clear]
bold bi bu bs
bi italic iu is
bu iu underline us
bs is su strike-through

(b=bold, i=italic, u=underline, s=strike-through)

You could have a similar drop-down menu for bullet selection (bullets, numbers, shapes…), etc.

You might be able to get everything onto a single toolbar doing this.

– Jon

I’m not fond of it, actually, mostly because the ‘+’/'-’ is not normally used to show/hide toolbars, so it’s inconsistent with the rest of the Gnome UI.

What might make more sense is a drop-down button-menu that would show the Italic/Bold/Underline/etc. buttons. Normally you would expect these to be used via keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+B, etc.), so the added button click shouldn’t be a major hindrance for reasonably advanced users.

Alternatively, (slightly) rethink the whole concept.

Instead of two buttons for font-size increase/decrease, have a drop-down list of potential font sizes. Instead of 4 buttons for bold/italic/underline/strike-through, have a drop-down grid (like Gnumeric’s foreground/background color selection widget) that shows all 16 combinations of bold/italic/underline/strike-through in combination:

[clear]
bold bi bu bs
bi italic iu is
bu iu underline us
bs is su strike-through

(b=bold, i=italic, u=underline, s=strike-through)

You could have a similar drop-down menu for bullet selection (bullets, numbers, shapes…), etc.

You might be able to get everything onto a single toolbar doing this.

– Jon