[6691] in Athena Bugs
re: rt 7.2N: console
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Dec 25 11:17:38 1990
From: cfields@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 90 11:18:06 -0500
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: jik@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [6678] in bugs
> What's wrong:
> Every other scrollbar on Athena that I've seen uses a region
> shaded in the foreground color to show how far down the text
> you are. Therefore, if you're at the bottom of the text, the
> foreground-shaded region is at the bottom of the scrollbar.
> Xconsole, on the other hand, appears to use the
> foreground-shaded region to show where you're *not*, not where
> you are, so when you're at the bottom of the text, the
> foreground-shaded region is at the top.
> What should have happened:
> It doesn't make sense to use the foreground color to show
> where you aren't. Furthermore, it's stupid to have one
> scrollbar doing things backwards from all the others. The
> xconsole scrollbar should look like the other scrollbars.
Oddly, you are only the third person I have heard complain about this.
Maybe that's because noone knows who to complain to and doesn't report
it to bugs either, or because it doesn't bother most people.
A bunch of points in no particular order...
a.) I have always found the Athena Widgets' scrollbar ugly. It seems to
have been written without much concern for how it looks.
b.) EZ uses a similar looking scrollbar.
c.) This is what the Mac scrollbar looks like too, if I remember correctly.
I liked it better, so that's what I did.
d.) The console scrollbar may be customized to look just as ugly
as the standard scrollbar. Or it may be configured to look like it
already does, except with the "foreground" and "background" swapped.
e.) Don't say "it doesn't make sense..." It's just convention, and many
people with Mac backgrounds might say the same thing of Athena's
standard scrollbars.
f.) "It's stupid..." Now, that may be. On the other hand, if it doesn't
confuse people (I don't know how many people it does) and it looks
nicer (it does to me :-) then I don't see a problem. What I really
see as dumb is that Athena pushes programs with scrollbars that
_function_ differently - programs built with the Athena Widgets vs.
those built with the Motif Widgets.
If there's a consensus that it ought to be changed, and there's going to
be another version, I can set up the resources for it.
Craig
P.S.
It's just "console," not "xconsole."
