mac_v: This approach makes it look more pleasant, but let's take another
approach and look at it from some perspective.
Ideally, when the ComboBox menu is shown, all items are visible and the
selected option is placed under the cursor.
We all agree this is requested behaviour and we see this in 90% of Gnome
applications.
Problems arise in 2 situations:
1. There are too many options to display them all in a manner described above.
2. ComboBox is placed near the bottom of the screen.
Both are corner cases.
Ad. 1. User know there are many options and excepts arrows allowing her
to see all entries. Presenting the current item under the cursor may be
a good thing, because otherwise it could be even a few-screens-of-
scrolling away.
Ad. 2. GTK+ Developers chose here to prefer the "Error prevention" principle
rather than "Visibility" principle.
Therefore it is easy to click and don't change selected entry (by clicking at
the current entry, pressing Escape or clicking somewhere else), while it's
harder to see all options and make a choice.
In a dialogue between user and the computer, developers chose that user
will probably click the ComboBox and don't change it's value, rather
than click in order to change it.
***
Looking at consistency at the whole desktop level, it may puzzle some
users ("why it doesn't display all entries? when window was placed in
the other part of the screen, all of them were visible?"). Moreover,
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines [1] says that menu items (it should in
a way apply to ComboBox items too) should all be visible: "Do not remove
command items from the menu when they are unavailable, make them
insensitive instead". When all items are visible when there is place for
them (even disabled ones!), we should apply this rule to all the cases
in order to improve consistency.
When disabled items are drawn using other style ("insensitive", disabled
ones), the other style could be used to mark out the current item
(bold?). Then it would be still easy to "go back" and all options could
be visible without the awkward arrows.
Maybe user testing would be useful here - upstream probably won't make any
change here:
"good that this bug is already closed. otherwise I would be tempted to WONTFIX
it at this point."
(comment by Matthias Clasen from Gnome bug 129463)
[1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/menus-design.html.en
--
ComboBox has a big blank area above the position of its control
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/388633
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