Feature request: Option to either disable the pop-up banner or show it always
Environment
- Lollypop version: 1.4.26
- GTK+ version: 4.4.1, 3.3.24.
- Operating system: Fedora Silverblue 35
Feature
I would like to request a configuration setting in Lollypop, to either disable the pop-up banner that appears when scrolling up, or otherwise show it all the time.
Currently, Lollypop displays a large banner at the top of the main view. This banner shows the title of the current view and has some action buttons. When viewing an album, the banner is significantly larger as it shows additional information (even when artwork size is turned down to its minimum value of 170). When scrolling down, the banner disappears, and when scrolling up, the banner reappears.
I have two complaints with the current functionality. The first, and more minor issue, is that the album banner takes up a large amount of space. The second, and much larger issue, is the layout inconsistency. When I scroll down, the banner disappears, but when I scroll up it reappears. This results in an inconsistent display, and it causes me no end of frustration.
I very often scroll down until I have everything that I care about on-screen. A bit later, I'll want to see something slightly above. So I scroll up to reveal the contents above... and the banner then promptly appears and covers-up the content that I wanted to see. I then have to scroll even further up to reveal the contents that I wanted to see, while working in a smaller space as the banner is taking up a large portion of the window. Once I finally see the window-content that I wanted to see, I scroll down and the banner disappears. But now I'm scrolled-down too far, as there is empty space at the top of the main view, or content that I don't care about. So I then have to scroll back down a little more, in order to finally have the window show exactly the content that I wanted to see. It's a constant back-and-forth battle fighting with the banner display.
Another issue for me comes when grabbing the scrollbar, rather than using the scroll wheel on the mouse. When I grab the scrollbar and drag it using my mouse, physical jitter with my hand can cause occasional movements in different directions. This results in the banner very rapidly appearing and disappearing and appearing and disappearing like crazy. All it takes to trigger this is a single pixel of movement in the opposite direction. It also seems to result in buggy scrollbar behaviour, where the scrollbar itself bounces around and ends up not being under my mouse cursor anymore, even though I still have it grabbed. It's even worse if I click-and-hold on the scrollbar to get the "slow, fine tuning" scrollbar mode.
I'm a little bit confused, because I searched and found issue #1637 (closed), which was opened two years ago and seems to be requesting exactly the same thing. The issue asked for the banner to be made always-visible or optional. The issue was closed as fixed, with commit e108721a supposedly making the banner always visible. But this is the issue that I'm still having? I'm confused.
I realise that the banner is designed like this intentionally, at least by default, and the developer(s) presumably like it. I realise that I'm not entitled to anything and you're providing this for free.
Other than this, Lollypop is perfect for me, and I love everything else about it. It seems like something that could be resolved with only minor changes. This is literally my only complaint with Lollypop. And yet for me, it is truly frustrating, to the point where it's genuinely become a deal-breaker. I no longer want to use Lollypop just because of this issue, even though everything else about the app is perfect. It's the point where I'm starting to look for alternative music players I could use. Unfortunately the other options seem much worse... I want something designed for GNOME, and as far as I can tell that already narrows it down to just Lollypop and GNOME Music... and GNOME Music has a much larger number of friction points for me. I want to keep using Lollypop... but this single issue is such an enormous friction point for me.
Is there any way you could please consider making the banner display optional, or always visible, to keep the layout consistent? Since the banner does contain important information and action buttons, making it always visible seems to be the better solution than an option to disable it entirely. I would therefore propose a boolean toggle option in the settings window: one state would keep the current auto-hide / auto-show behaviour; the other state would keep the banner visible constantly, never hiding it.
Thanks.