Usability improvements for PgAmin4

Dear friends at Pgadmin developer team:

First of all I would like to thank very much you your commitment and effort in developing such usable and professional tools like PgAdmin.

But also I want to make you know that in my opinion PgAdmin4 has lose in usability and performance respect to PgAdmin III, where I was used to access the information in a more rapid way (with the same hardware). Of course I’m sure that PgAdmin4 has a lot of advantages regarding to his new architecture: maintainability, multi-platform, etc., that they will contribute to the future of this tool.

Regarding to usability: it is difficult for me to explain all the worse user experience situations but I must say that in a whole the user experience is worse.

That is the reason for not having adopted yet PgAdmin4 in my daily work (after some test drives) and why I’ve been using PgAdmin3 until today.

But that is going to an end: I am started to use PostgreSQL 10 and PgAdmin III issues to many compatibility errors… In other words: I am now forced to rid of PgAdmin III and search for other alternatives.

Issues to point (I enclose the reference to a previous thread regarding some of them):

• Performance:
  • Starting the application.
  • SQL Pane: time to refresh the SQL corresponding to a DB object.
• Query tool:
  • Lack of status bar: this functionality was very, very, very useful. Not only for Line, column position, also for the last returned information (query result time). Need of a fixed area for this kind of information.
  • Query info notifier: related to the previous. I strongly discourage you to use such kind of “moving” UI artifacts. Things that appear and disappear could be nice and fancy for some users but also annoying and focus losing:
    • If you configure it to disappear: you want have the info. when you need it unless you click (another click) the message history.
    • When the notifier disappears: distraction, focus lose. We are information users, needed of concentration, focus…
    • If you configure it to not disappear: you will get a stack of messages that you will have to hide manually (each one)…
  • Thanks god (and you) that you can configure to show Query tool in a new Browser window (detachable from the main window indeed), but:
    • It would be also useful to be able to configure these new windows would be detached when they are created.
    • Ctrl++, Ctrl+-, don’t work in detached Query Tool windows. I suppose this can be amended.
• Backup and restore feedback: the same problems stated due to the use of “notifier toasts”.

Related conversation:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/1597397302.9546526.1506434712083%40mail.yahoo.com#1597397302.9546526.1506434712083@mail.yahoo.com

Thanks again for your work. Looking forward to see these and new improvements in incoming versions.

César Arriaga