Simplifying language settings
Submitted by Frank
Link to original bug (#791181)
Description
Currently, the language settings are just a way too long list of languages, of which most are never ever used by the average programmer. We should keep things simple and ordered – and as such, don’t display unused settings, as these just lead to avoidable overwhelming and confusion.
The search function also isn’t of use here, because mostly you use a few languages, and searching for every single language and configuring it repeatedly is way too much cumbersome work and would likely lead to forgetting something.
I’d like to target this problem by two approaches:
First: Introducing a “Default” or “General” settings category, which lets us hide all languages in the list completely at first (since the pre-set defines every single language to use the default settings).
Second: Then we make customized language settings available at explicit demand: We therefore need a “plus” button at the bottom of the language list for adding custom languages.
Further characteristics:
• When the “plus” icon gets clicked, the list of all available languages should be displayed inside the right pane – for letting the user select a language to add to the list.
• The per-language-settings should add two entries: – A “trash” icon for removing the language entry from the list. – A “Use default settings” switch, which deactivates this language entry and greys out both the language name in the list, and all the according settings (think of how the dconf defaults work).
I’ll add a first mock-up, when I’m finished.