I have already touched on some issues, but here are my thoughts in general
on spyder's appearance:
*Icons and Theming*
As I have mentioned, I am strongly in favor of native appearance wherever
possible. Qt is extremely good at this, and I think it makes for a much
better experience overall. People are great at learning patterns, and each
theme has a slightly different one. So I think that keeping things
consistent with what people have learned to expect will go a long way to
making things work more smoothly.
This applies to icons as well. Icons within the same theme tend to follow
similar patterns and metaphors. Learning that metaphor makes it much
easier to find what you need in another application, even if the actual
commands you are looking for are different. Conversely, trying to find
things in an icon theme you are not familiar with often takes much longer.
So I think keeping the native icon theme wherever possible is better.
*UI Layout*
A lot of work can be done in making the layouts more consistent.
Especially across panels there is a great deal of variation in the size of
toolbars, borders around nested widgets, whether toolbars are on the side
or top, whether there is a colon (":") after widget labels, icons used for
identical tasks, whether identical actions have an icon or not, whether the
toolbar menu icon is right-aligned, whether there are toolbar buttons or
just one toolbar menu, etc. Some panels even let you independently turn on
or off toolbar labels, which shouldn't be possible. There is a lot of
redundancy, with some items repeated two, three, or even more times (like
the many ways you can change the current console working directory).
There is a lot of work going on in general UI guidelines for various
projects. I don't suggest the project adopt any, but looking through some
to see what sort of issues people are considering might help identify
issues that also exist in spyder. KDE has a good Qt-oriented one. Again,
I am *not* suggesting spyder follow KDE's design guidelines, just that
understanding what sort of issues can exist can be helpful.
One thing I would consider is using vertical tabs for the panels. This
allows you to have panels that are available, but hidden by default.
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