#642 Adding a toolbar in OmegaT

[Anonymous]

Toolbars can be very useful, for bringing deep menu items within
one click of the user. Toolbarr can simplify repetitive tasks by bringing the dialog's launch
links right to the front of the interface.

OmegaT+ has a vertical toolbar and a horizontal toolbar. The
subtoolbars can be moved around, but it doesn't look like one can create
your own buttons or your own toolbars.

But unfortunately omegat does not have toolbar function.

So I hope you add this toolbar function to omegat in the next version .

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

Deep menu items are typically items that are not accessed very often, hence the cost to create a toolbar for such items would be well over the use people have for such items.

Also, in OmegaT all the menu items can be associated a shortcut, which effectively puts all the menu items within one shortcut of the user.

It would be more useful to discuss which items should be assigned a standard shortcut (if that is not the case now) than to propose a deep modification of the current user interface.

[Samuel Murray]

Some of us are more visual in nature. I can remember what an icon is for even if I haven't use the icon for a long while, but I can't remember a keyboard shortcut unless I use it very frequently. Simply adding keyboard shortcuts that all the dialogs will be good but it won't solve the "problem" of not having a toolbar.

Deep menu items may not be frequently used *in general* but there may be times when a user in a specific project needs to access it in short succession. Also, some items are 'deep' but having quick access to it will improve OmegaT's usability, e.g. the segmentation dialog.

I don't care about the cost -- the cost of developing an item should not be a valid reason not to accept or reject the feature in principle. One can object to something on the basis of cost after all other objections were answered.

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

I am not accepting or rejecting the request, I am barely commenting on the fact that asking to create icons for easy access when easy access is already available with a customizable shortcut is likely to be considered too "costly". There is a time cost (discussion/development/testing) and a financial cost (icon creation).
For cases where a user need to access an item in short succession, remembering the associated shortcut may be the fastest way to get to the feature.

[Samuel Murray]

Is there really a financial cost for icon creation? There are freely available free (libre) icon sets.

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

The free icons with the floppy disk for "save" ? I haven't seen a floppy disk in most of the last decade. Free icon sets that include "go to next untranslated" ?

[Sadi Yumusak]

If there's a will there's a way ;-)
A toolbar (optional and even customizable perhaps?) would surely add more ease of use as well better looks to OmegaT...

[Thomas CORDONNIER]

I have implemented in OmegaT a toolbar which is a subset of the one from Omegat+
Taking the same icons as in OmegaT+ has two advantages : it helps people who know both tools, and I am sure it is allowed since both tools share the same license.
I did not implement all OmegaT+ icons because some of them correspond to menus which don't exist in OmegaT or are in another place. For example the icons for Copy+Cut+Paste could cause a problem since these functions are in a contextual menu in OmegaT and in some cironstances they are grayed : it wold be difficult automatically to gray the coresponding buttons.

In any case the patch is ready, are you interested in testing it and include in OmegaT?

[Didier Briel]

This answer is a straight no.

I will not include in OmegaT any element coming from OmegaT+.

Didier Briel

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

12 years later...

What about an optional toolbar, with an arbitrary number of buttons, set by the user, with room for associating an icon or just text to any function declared in the menus?

Version 6.2 is supposed to have a focus on UI, so maybe we could brainstorm on what could possibly help users, more than what we did with the 6.0 UI refresh?

[st. pakebusch]

on it for the Ωt 6.2. mission, and please forgive me (or not), but the community had another 2 years to discuss this and evidently did not do it here, so i will implement a proposal to solve the requested feature.

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

https://omegat.readthedocs.io/en/latest/04.ContributingOmegaT.html#start-a-conversation

As per the above comment, the toolbar should be optional and OmegaT should not offer default icons. And you still need to discuss that on the lists.

[st. pakebusch]

okay done, and i have opened https://github.com/omegat-org/omegat/pull/2376 as a draft (reviewability will be delayed because it is stacked on top of other groundwork PRs) and there are screenshots. that branch can be checked out and is runnable all the same, since it is all about a fully user-configurable toolbar - any example i can give will be only useful to me, other users can make it useful for their own needs. and as requested, built as a 'misc' plugin.

what it can do, among others:

• wysiwyg settings life apply without restart, export/import
• any existing menu item as button (or checkbox or slider or combobox if appropriate for the item)
• stored repeatable search presets (configured in a wizard with the real search window)
• options, view and project settings as quick access items (e.g. enable MT on/off switch, fontsize slider, sentence segmentation, etc. pp. et ad infinitum)
• free text snippets, urls to jump to
• fully user defined text including emoji, coloring, optional user defined icons, drag+drop layout at runtime, dockable panel basis so can be docked as toolbar or undocked and resized fullscreen on second screen if need be