You can lead a horse to water... (New LibreOffice behavior)

blackhaz

blackhaz

<rant>

After another pkg upgrade, and accidentally pressing Insert while typing in LibreOffice Writer, my flow of thoughts has been interrupted with this abomination:

1768644945398.png


Are we now catering to the illiterate?

On one hand, why not - we can do both, just click on the "do show again" and calm down (and what an odd formula, I would have expected "do NOT show again" here... Why?!) On the other hand, you can't force-feed knowledge to people. Before, with the user wondering why he's suddenly overwriting his text, that very sense has engendered him to come out, investigate and learn. Now everything wants to grab your attention. It's sad to see the "do not put the plastic bag over your baby's head!" world has arrived in open source software, but with Linux becoming even more popular I guess the contribution to the noise and the simultaneous rise of attention deficit is inevitable. I sincerely hope FreeBSD will keep it zen and won't follow. Pressing the "Insert" key should not trigger a pop-up.

<end of rant>
 
Out of curiousity, if you uncheck "do show again" does the dialog show up again?
I've always hated modal dialogs for something none critical; I've felt this way since windows 3.x.
If this informational was NOT modal, and had a simple dismiss button or if it showed up on a status bar (like Emacs that changes if you toggle between insert and overwrite) that would be Ok simply because least intrusive.

I wonder if there is a setting somewhere that modifies this behavior; if so, perhaps a modification for the FreeBSD port would be to set it "disabled" (like WaterFox/Librewolf change some Firefox defaults)
 
If I uncheck it then it won't pop up again, so that checkbox works. Fully agree on modality. I imagine a direction contrary to the improvement of this whole situation would be to introduce a loud bell sound to alert the unaware user that his typing has now stopped and all the keypressing is really in vain until he attends the display in front of his face.
 
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blackhaz said:
Pressing the "Insert" key should not trigger a pop-up.
Click to expand...
I never used that key's function, and disliked accidentally hitting it in GUI Terminals and wondering why my text was being typed oddly. I prefer Insert to not be enabled, and want to know all about if I accidentally hit a button before I mess up too much text :p (usually laptops with Fn/odd placements for it; my current USB keyboard doesn't have a visible key for it)
 
Wait, the file name is soffice.bin, like StarOffice, as in the beginning?

I don't use LibreOffice for many years, I run OpenOffice, even on Windows workstations. So I avoid this kind of bullshit-feature-nobody-asked-for.

@blakhaz what is your desktop environment ?

​

 
This is probably the most unwarranted rant I've ever seen. If you click the checkbox, the form doesn't appear anymore. So this rant is for ONE message that you didn't expect—ONE message. This goes beyond a first world problem; this is a celestial problem, an angelical problem.

But it's entertaining. I encourage you to keep getting upset each time some free-of-charge app doesn't work exactly how you expected and then venting your wrath by posting your thoughts. I think you can improve with time and write longer and longer rants about smaller and smaller problems.
 
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