Configure Keyboard Shortcuts

Started by LociOiling

LociOiling Lv 1

The new interface has changed a number of hotkeys (shortcuts) to new defaults.

Configure Keyboard Shortcuts has improved. The Configure Keyboard Shortcuts window is now resizable, which helps in locating a given shortcut.

There are still some areas which could be improved.

  1. Configure Keyboard Shortcuts is buried, under General Options (Ctrl+T), Controls -> Configure Keyboard Shortcuts. Perhaps it could be moved to the main menu (menu menu), or even given its own hotkey. (Alt+K?)
  2. Configure Keyboard Shortcuts is modal. You're stuck with General Options menu across the screen. An independent window like view options or behavior would be better if possible.
  3. It's difficult to find the desired entry. The ability to search on the function name or shortcut value would be helpful. Treating the shortcut as text would be one approach, for example, just type "Ctrl+Z" without using the actual Ctrl key.
  4. The shortcuts displayed are only the ones for the current puzzle. In some cases, they redefine shortcuts available in other puzzle types. For example, M is "mutate to specific amino acid" in protein design puzzles, but becomes "MMFF wiggle" in small molecule design puzzles. This can be confusing, and a possible source for errors. A "show all shortcuts" checkbox might help reduce confusion. </ol>

phi16 Lv 1

I admire your efforts to help here. This new design seems so far from flight-worthy it barely merits debugging at this point. I would suggest going back to the drawing board and asking some fundamental questions about what we're doing here and what is to be accomplished.

Spoiler alert: whoever designed this monster is not going to enjoy my criticism.

There are no less than seven different graphic treatments for menus and options. Please choose two or three at most and choose them for an appropriate reason such as: "Look here first".

There are:

1) squares with capital letters and graphic icons. (Here's an idea: In help menu have a list that explains the capital letters used here, i.e."K=Change to Helix")

2) Green icons for cookbook, behavior options, View menus, etc. (The green goes with nothing else on this website.)

3) Puzzle Menu, General Options, Save Solution, etc. menus hidden behind the Fold.it logo. (How did these particular nine menu items come to live in the same menu?)

4) A giant score in a previously unseen font large enough for the Queen of England to see without her spectacles.

5) A scoreboard listing individual and team play score competitions.

6) a Stop clock clicking off units of something I never understood.

7) A Chat window with four possible chats.

After that almost as an afterthought is the protein itself. I pity the poor users with only a laptop screen. What's a folder to do?

Please bring all of these elements together so that one is led to believe it has a singular purpose. Each of these elements looks like it was designed individually without the existence of set standards for graphics, icons, colors, fonts, font sizes, control of the footprint, reserved space, etc.

As it is, it is unusable. It took me 45 minutes to figure out that the icon in the square marked L brought up another menu for changing structures. btw the same icon for L was what has been for eight years the Auto Structures icon, and lo and behold, Auto Structures is still used in another square in the same way.

That took me 45 minutes and I knew what I was looking for. Imagine what someone has to do who doesn't know of the structures function who wonders "How can I change a helix to a sheet?"

This design is unusable. Period.

LociOiling Lv 1

I disagree about the design being unusable. There are still lots of annoyances (some new, mostly old), but a lot of longstanding issues have been resolved in the last year or so. The recent changes have made life difficult for original interface players, but it hasn't been that easy for selection interface folks, either.

The big thing is that the development team is working in high gear. It seems like there are more people working on Foldit these days, and they're able to turn out fixes and new features much more quickly. The demise of the original interface is probably helping them pick up the pace. Since the new interface was announced, they've made tons of fixes. Some of it was stuff that the new interface broke, but a lot was stuff that had been broken for a while or never really worked right in the first place.

On the point-by-point front:

  1. The help does cover the hotkeys, under Controls. The organization has improved recently, but it's still a couple of clicks deep. The Actions tab is in the middle of the list under Controls, instead of being near the top. The help doesn't cover the submenus in Assign Secondary Structure or Mutate. The wiki also covers the key assignments, but its list no doubt needs further revisions: https://foldit.fandom.com/wiki/Action_bar
  2. The green is kind of annoying, but maybe a setting in theme.txt could help. In the mean time, I'm getting used to it.
  3. The main menu/menu menu has been more or less the same in the original and selection interfaces for years. A couple of items have changed, and it's moved to a new location on the screen.
  4. The score does seem a little large. Some of the recent changes are intended for very large displays, such as UHD, which is 3840 x 2160. If Foldit is a game, that's where high-end PC gamers are. On the font side, the score looks to be in Noto Sans. Not everyone's favorite, but going with Noto Sans did allow Foldit to support Korean, Japanese, and maybe even Chinese, which had long been on the list.
  5. The scoreboards have been the same for years. Like many of the other items, they be hidden with "Hide GUI", Shift+G by default. Clicking on the Foldit icon in the upper left now does the same thing.
  6. Shift+G, or click on the Foldit icon
  7. Shift+G, or click on the Foldit icon </ol> On the annoyance side, I use Shift+G a lot, and it was kind of annoying when it was broken for a week or so. It doesn't hide the score or any floating windows that are open, but it gets rid of pretty much everything else. Even the action bar is hidden, but the tool are still available through hotkeys. Another old annoyance is floating windows that open behind other floating windows or open at the very edges of the screen in a seemingly random location. That may be my biggest companion peeve at the moment.