Going through Dragora's installer a couple of times, I realized that the messages could be improved a bit. I have a couple of ideas on how to do this and want to share them here for discussion.
I've decided to go about this one thread per message/dialog and also not start the next thread until the discussion in the current one is done. This will help to keep everyone's stress level down (including mine). So, here's the installer's first message (currently starting on line 132 in the main script): > Welcome to dragora-installer. > > This program prepares Dragora 3.0 to run on your computer. > > - To set up Dragora now, press ENTER. > > - To quit, press Esc. > > Use the arrow keys to move between options and selections, also TAB to > jump from one option to another. ENTER to continue, Esc to cancel or > return to a previous menu, and Ctrl+C to abort the installation at any > time. > > * Here is a representation of the most commonly used keys in a QWERTY > layout: > > [...] Some suggestions on how to improve this: I. I would make the second line say “This program will help you install Dragora 3.0 on your computer.” II. I'd remove the empty line between the two lines starting with a dash. Then, I'd move those lines to the end of the dialog window because the user should have read everything that follows before making a decision, especially if that decision is to use the installer to set up Dragora. III. Now, the paragraph describing the installer's keybindings seems to be a bit more complicated to get right. The first sentence could be changed to the following: “Use the arrow keys to move between options and selections, Tab to jump to the next option and Shift+Tab to jump to the previous one.“ This would, of course, require Shift+Tab to really work that way. But that is already being worked on anyway. Also, I'm unsure if “options” vs. “selections” is clearly understandable. If ncurses has standard terms for these kinds of things, it would be better to use those. I'm not really sure about the second sentence. The Ctrl+C part should be a sentence of its own, IMO. E.g.: “You can use Ctrl+C to abort the installation at any time.” Then, there are a couple of problems with the first part. First of all, it doesn't actually state what to do with the mentioned keys, i.e., it doesn't say that you have to press or hit them. I know this is self-evident, but the verb still needs to be there. Apart from that, “ENTER to continue, Esc to cancel” begs the questions „To continue what?“ and „To cancel what?“. IV. I'd remove the leading asterisk from the line saying “* Here is a representation of the most commonly used keys in a QWERTY layout:” Also, I think that “representation” is not the right word to describe what follows. It's more like a map or an overview. There's probably a canonical term for this. I'd have to look that up. --msi
