I pressed some key while in darkroom mode, and now I’m stuck in some sort of fullscreen mode. It looks like if I had pressed SHIFT-w, but the mode does not exit when I press w. (This is with darktable 4.1 development version.)
Double-clicking the mouse switches to the lighttable, but when switching back to the darkroom, the fullscreen mode is still active. Same is true when I exit and restart the program.
I must be missing something. Perhaps someone has a suggestion?
It seems that darktable should have some exit panic key. (Perhaps it has one that I do not know?) Even the arcane Emacs has ctrl-g!
OK, I pressed b and this made “arrows” appear at the left, right, and top. Then I was able to click on these to make the panes reappear. However, I still have no idea how I managed to make them all disappear in the first place.
Overall, my beginner’s impression is that it wouldn’t be bad if there was some sort of panic key (for example esc). Otherwise, if someone presses shift-h or shift-w by accident, he will be stuck in a full-screen view with no other apparent way of exiting other than pressing, respectively, h or w. IMHO this is quite bad from a usability point of view - and this is the observation of a veteran Unix user.
All the hotkeys are configurable. If you want a panic key to do something (not clear what action you’d want to take here), then assign one.
Again, full screen is generally a function of your window manager. Very generally F11 tolggles full screen function. Again, you haven’t told us what OS you’re using, so its hard to tell you what to do. Very generally, the hotkey toggles full screen, so use the same key combo you used to get into full screen to get out.
Otherwise please provide the informatiom requested instead of providing veteran opinions.
I think that this is a deficiency in the UI design. Imagine a beginner who presses “shift-w” by accident. Then she is stuck in a full screen mode with no way to exit other than pressing “w”. My impression is that either I am missing something, or this is bad UI design.
A possible solution would be to hard-wire “escape” to exit any “minor” mode (like full screen, slide show), and bring back the UI to a defined state.
I do not think that RTFM is a useful solution here. I have spent several hours studying the darktable manual already.
I’m on Linux running XFCE, but that’s not the point here. I used the term “full screen” to describe a mode where the preview image of darktable occupies the full window. This is independent of the window manager’s full screen functionality that I am able to control all the time. I thought that this was clear from my description of the problem (I wrote that the panes disappeared).
Thanks, this is what happened apparently. I must have pressed tab. But see, I’ve been using darktable for countless hours already (since last year actually), and I haven’t stumbled across this shortcut yet. I pressed “esc” to get out, I pressed “w”, and many other keys, but to no avail.
If no one agrees that this is a confusing default behavior (especially for a software that is meant for photographers who are not always very computer-savvy), then I find this quite surprising.
Tab should collapse all panels unless something is amiss I believe…. And you can click on the small arrows to open the panels
This was strange because ctrl-f does this normally so I am not sure but later in your subsequent replies you seem to have tab working and also you used the b for bottom key so I am not full sure how you got to where the keys were working or not working but again press h will give you the list of keys that can be used in any view so you should be able to get out of jail in the future if you refer to this…
I had disabled the small arrows in order to conserve screen real estate.
Yes, when I had the problem, tab would only toggle the bottom pane. So apparently I didn’t get into the situation by pressing tab, but something else. I also didn’t get there by pressing shift-w. Apparently there seems to be yet another “full screen” mode.
Pressing “h” is not really a solution. First of all, someone who gets stuck in a strange view (like I did) might not know about that button. Second, “h” shows a lot of text, and there’s no way to search through it other then reading all of it. Third, if one doesn’t know in what mode one is stuck, the help will not be of much use anyway.
I would be interested to know if I’m the only one who thinks that this is a usability problem. If others agree with me that there is room for improvement in the UI with regard to being able to exit an unknown mode, I would be happy to open an issue with darktable on github.
I don’t think ESC is mapped to anything. I really only took a quick look so I could have easily missed it… Then next part would be deciding what you could map that to to give you a consistent outcome in multiple situations where you might be looking to cancel our step back…
I no longer need any solution for this issue for myself. I will remember what to do. However, I think that it’s worth resolving it for other newcomers to darktable.
I think that a possible solution could be:
Create an action that makes reappear the user interface no matter what the current mode is.
A lot of stockholming¹ going on when working with software.
And some even defend it because they have forgotten how it felt when they were new.
The sad problem with opensource software developed by a dynamic team is the multitude of product managers. And that is by far not a problem of darktable alone. A project needs a benevolent dictator that really understands how good design is the one thing that holds the software together and really pushes every little decision towards that vision.
I agree that in general “full screen” modes should have obvious ways out. Tab is a common one though so it was a good choice by darktable folks. ESC is another one.
I do think it’s a fairly common user question for other complex software such as dtp and cad. Over my years as a user of such software I’ve seen many people trying to get their panels back. The thing is a more experience user will be really annoyed by say an icon on top of their work, I know I would be, thats probably the reason people loose their panels with some frequency.
I just tried F11 in Firefox and there are no easy ways out of that one either.
You’ve used a common computer UI term, “full screen”, which did not adequately describe your issue, nor did you really clarify or describe what happened until several posts later.
You purposefully disabled the visual buttons that would have made your panels reappear. Its pretty obvious if you have the arrows enabled to click them if the panel is gone. Disabling the arrow button is beyond “new user” behavior, IMO.
H key to display available hotkeys would’ve been fine if you knew what the thing you wanted was called. I don’t think darktable uses any special language that is much different from other complex software in this regard.
The proposed solution, of “track all my UI interactions and give me a global hotkey to toggle the last behavior” would be a ton of work for not a lot of pay off, I think. Is there any software that actually does this?
It seems you mashed some random keys on your keyboard or something, perhaps some midi controller like a loupedeck would be better if you can not keep track of what keys you’re pressing. We do have support for a bunch of hardware to use as input.
The Firefox full screen mode is critically more user friendly. Enabling it shows a warning that explains how to go back. (This warning can be disabled explicitly by the user.)
Even when the warning has been disabled:
Moving the mouse pointer up makes UI elements reappear.
Using the usual window manager key to “unmaximize” a window quits full screen mode as well.
It is possible to quit the program with the usual key combination (or simply through the window manager). After restarting it comes back in usual mode.
So I think that the situation with darktable is not quite the same.
There are many possible ways to make hidden panes reappear without annoying seasoned users. For example, even if the “arrows” have been disabled, moving the mouse to a border could make them reappear.
Dear @paperdigits, once I had found a solution to my immediate problem (with some prompt help from this friendly forum), I only tried to help with improving darktable by pointing to what I genuinely think is a usability problem.
I am an author of free software myself. I value constructive criticism as a matter of principle.
There is no need to track anything. It’s enough to go back to the basic way any mode (like lightable or darkroom). I do not know the internals of darktable’s code base, but this sounds like potentially useful functionality.
I can think of other ways to mitigate the problem. For example, the panel collapsing controls (“arrows”) could be shown for a collapsed pane whenever the mouse pointer is moved to the border of the screen.
But identifying a concrete solution is a second step. Imagine a new user who fires up darktable for the first time, with no customization (the “arrows” are visible). Then, In lighttable mode, the user mistypes and presses “W” (shift-w) and finds himself stuck in a mode with all the UI gone, and no apparent way to go back. Pressing esc does not help, nor pressing “q”, nor moving or clicking the mouse, nor unmaximizing the window. The user has to know that he needs to press “w” again.
The first step would be to acknowledge that this UI design has potential for improvement.
