Suggested editor toolbar layout changes: responding to 1.0.207

Features
1

I think the editor toolbar changes in 1.0.207 work against esthetics and usability. Here’s a quick re-layout with an explanation.

  1. Title at the top, no distractions. It’s important to keep a page’s title obvious, and the most common place to put a title is at the very top of a page.
  2. Note Actions. This solves a long-standing issue: where the tags go. By keeping them to the right of other note-related buttons, there’s plenty of space without them being on a separate line. Note also the Tag button is last, right next to the tags.
  3. Note Formatting. Also a traditional layout, keep the text formatting near the text.

Joplin layout
Joplin layout800×246 8.92 KB

3 Likes
2

This looks good to me, and all your rationales make sense. Looking at this, I can’t see any reason why anything would move around as you move between notes, which is good.

Tho:

  1. If Joplin is keeping the “In:” label for notebooks, where would that go? Perhaps rhs of tag list? Or rhs of title box?
  2. If the tag list is longer than the space available, what should it do? Scroll arrows appear at rhs of tag list?
3
  1. I’d keep the “In: notebook” panel in the same place, for now. But it deserves attention because it behaves differently on the desktop than in the phone app.
  2. An arrow would be nice, but right now Joplin doesn’t have an adaptive design anyway. In a future release, I’d like to be able to add/remove tags directly in the tag area.

Thanks for your thoughts.

4

Thanks it indeed looks better than the current layout so I think I’ll implement that.

It would still be kind of temporary and I hope the whole thing can be improved later on if/when the UI is redesigned.

1 Like
5

Thanks! I figured it’d be temporary, but I also thought it’d be a reasonably easy change in either the page or CSS.

I’ll contribute other usability ideas and hopefully some pull requests when I can make the time. Thanks for your effort on this valuable tool.

1 Like
6

WRT the “In: notebook” label, a problem with the current arrangement is that it causes the toolbar to move horizontally. See the issue https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/3178.

(that issue has been closed, but I’m not sure if it should have been)

7

I agree. It’s not ideal, but better, and Laurent hopes for a fuller UI revision down the road.