File history UI suggestions

[olibclarke@…]

The following bug report has been submitted:
Platform:        Darwin-18.5.0-x86_64-i386-64bit
ChimeraX Version: 0.9 (2019-04-28)
Description
Hi,

The view when I load up ChimeraX has thumbnails of recently accessed files/sessions, which is very useful. However, quite a few of these have been deleted over time, and when I click on one I get an error message telling me as much. Would it be possible to add an option to check and auto-remove files that no longer exist from this view? Also some kind of "smart" categorization might be handy - e.g. a tabbed view visually separating recent volumes from recent coordinate files, for example.

Cheers
Oli

Log:
UCSF ChimeraX version: 0.9 (2019-04-28)  
© 2016-2019 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.  
How to cite UCSF ChimeraX  

> open
/Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/Downloads/muscle-I20190426-161819-0369-68254776-p2m.fasta.txt

Unrecognized file suffix '.txt'  

> open
/Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/Downloads/muscle-I20190426-161819-0369-68254776-p2m.fasta

Summary of feedback from opening
/Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/Downloads/muscle-I20190426-161819-0369-68254776-p2m.fasta  
---  
note | Alignment identifier is muscle-I20190426-161819-0369-68254776-p2m.fasta  
  
Opened 7 sequences from muscle-I20190426-161819-0369-68254776-p2m.fasta  

> open
/Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/Downloads/cryosparc_P27_J326_005_volume_map_sharp.mrc

File not found:
/Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/Downloads/cryosparc_P27_J326_005_volume_map_sharp.mrc  

> open 1bl8 format mmCIF fromDatabase pdb

1bl8 title:  
Potassium channel (KCSA) from streptomyces lividans [more info...]  
  
Chain information for 1bl8 #1  
---  
Chain | Description  
A B C D | protein (potassium channel protein)  
  
  

> open /Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/GPU_sync/cryosparc_P27_J106_006_autosharp.mrc

File not found:
/Users/olibclarke/Dropbox/GPU_sync/cryosparc_P27_J106_006_autosharp.mrc  




OpenGL version: 4.1 INTEL-12.8.38
OpenGL renderer: Intel(R) Iris(TM) Graphics 6100
OpenGL vendor: Intel Inc.

[Tom Goddard]

If you right-click on the history thumbnails panel a menu will display that offers "Remove deleted files". That will help you. A preference setting to do this could be nice, I guess it would be done at start-up. The trouble is that if a disk (e.g. a usb drive or network drive) does not respond when querying whether your history files exist then it can hang the ChimeraX startup. So it is complex to handle without impairing performance. Even without that scenario, just checking if hundreds of files exist may significantly slow startup. So this feature requires a more complex implementation so it can be done in the background.

History sorting by category could be nice, requires more user interface, and a design for what are the useful categories and sort order.

I don't suspect either of these features will get attention as we have very much reduced support for ChimeraX development compared to what we had for Chimera.

[olibclarke@…]

I never knew that was there or that those thumbnails were right-clickable! Perhaps it would be useful to also put that button on the dialog that appears when one tries to open a deleted file?

Cheers
Oli

[olibclarke@…]

Added by email2trac

[Tom Goddard]

Could make a special dialog instead of the generic error dialog. That requires some additional code to implement that new dialog. Perhaps simpler would be to put some extra text in the error dialog that says "Right click on the thumbnail history panel shows a menu that allows you to remove all thumbnails for missing files.". A quick look at the code shows that this is not easy. The thumbnail panel is an html widget with images that have links that run the open command. By the time the open command is run it has no idea that the user clicked on a thumbnail. This would also make implementing a special dialog difficult. Either would probably require a special argument to the open command to say that this attempt to open was from a thumbnail click.

[Tom Goddard]

Just yesterday we were discussing with the new tabbed toolbar that users may not know they can right click on it to change settings (like whether to show text). In general all of the right click (context menu) features in ChimeraX, and there are many such features are hard to discover, unless the user simply tries right clicking on various elements.

Besides testing the user interface with right clicks (these context menus on right click are a common element of very many software packages from web browsers to mail clients...), there is of course searching the documentation to see if a feature exists. For instance, to search whether file history thumbnails can be deleted a google search for "chimerax thumbnails" or "chimerax file history" leads to the documentation which says a right click allows removing thumbnails for missing files. Of course, almost no one reads or searches in documentation, so we try to stick to discoverable user interfaces that can be learned without documentation.

[olibclarke@…]

Hi Tom

Until this point it was not apparent to me how prevalent context menus were in ChimeraX, so this has been useful. 

I’m sorry I did look at the docs, but I didn’t find it on first inspection and didn’t know what term to google at the time, even though it is obvious now you say it. 

Context menus are great, but when their contents vary a lot depending on the UI element one right clicks it can be hard to discover features. Now that I am aware, I will try right-clicking on everything and see what happens!

Cheers
Oli