Re: Appreciation for pgAdmin 4's progress

I concur.  Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V is basically muscle memory at this point.  Unfortunately though there are times when it's particularly jarring.  Selecting things are done in pgAdmin4 with the mouse/track ball/etc. so your hand is already off the keyboard.  So for example; you select an sql statement to copy/paste/make a small change/run a process I do all the time in pgAdmin4.  Select->right-click->grumble about useless options->Ctrl-C->move to another area with mouse->Ctrl-V.

It seems especially strange since if you select a cell in the results pane the copy / paste options are in that context menu.

Question:  Why would anyone ever want to 'Remove Panel', 'Detach Panel', or 'Add Panel' (the only options in the current query tool context menu)?

• You can't move them outside of the tab and only within a of a smallish portion of the current tab.
• You can't reattach them, so trying to use that option to rearrange them doesn't work.
• The only way to fix it, if you've accidentally selected it is the nuclear option of 'Reset Layout'.

There are just certain items that people expect in a context menu, especially one that's associated with a text editor.  None of them currently exist in the context menu of the query tool.  It would be nice if that could be addressed, sooner as opposed to later.

Thanks, 

rik. 

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 12:26 PM Dave Caughey <caugheyd@gmail.com> wrote:

Correct.  But the absence of support in the context menu is a basic UI usability issue. Instead we only have "remove panel", "detach panel", "add panel".

Context menus are an essential usability feature.  A context menu is intended to allow the user to quickly access the basic operations that apply to whatever is clicked on / selected (i.e., the "context"), and the menu items should be biased towards very commonly used actions (e.g., e.g., copy/paste, new, etc.).  The most frequently used should be situated near the top of the context menu to minimize the mouse movement required to get to the desired operation. Less frequently-used stuff should be buried in submenus because the usability hit required to get to these uncommon operations is a big deal, compared with making it easier to get to the common operations.

I totally understand that you don't think it's a big issue because (clearly) you're happy to use keyboard shortcuts.  But that's that way you prefer to work.   But many (most?) people rely on context menus, and it's just an unnecessary usability irritant when the stuff that you expect to find in a context menu is missing (e.g., #4229) or when the context menu hasn't had any thought given to the relative frequency of the operations (e.g., right-click on a table in the navigation pane, and you'll see less-frequently used operations like "Reset Statistics", "Drop Cascaded", "Maintenance", all above the super-common operations that are buried under "View/Edit Data..." way down at the bottom of the context menu.  I.e., the table context menu is just about as far from optimal as possible!)

Is the absence/presence and thoughtful layout of context items a major functionality gap?  No.  But is it a *completely unnecessary* every-day usability irritant?  Yes.

Cheers,
Dave

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 11:52 AM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 4:45 PM Dave Caughey <caugheyd@gmail.com> wrote:

No, it doesn't work.  It's logged as #4229.   It would be *really* nice if this were fixed.

4229 is about adding a context menu for it. It works without though - just use Ctrl/Cmd+C and Ctrl/Cmd+V. You can copy query text, cell values, entire rows, or sets of rows.

 

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Dave Page
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Twitter: @pgsnake

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