14.1 look & feel - too flat
Hi, I upgraded to the 14.1 yesterday and for the first time in 10+ year history of using IDEA I'm afraid of changes coming. Please don't go too far with getting rid of shadows, borders and backgrounds!
I understand that flat designs are very fashionable nowadays, but design should not win in comparison with convenience of use. To be the most handy and easy-to-use as well as full-featured dev tool was a main goal of IDEA all this time. Please stick to that going ahead. Design fashion is a subject to change, while the application is losing the usability following it.
Colors are really needed to distinguish semantically different areas of the IDE screen and the new marker bar doesn’t make me optimistic. It doesn’t react on theme switching staying flat and transparent; new pale marker colors are also a try to look modern instead of making a bright warning to the user about the line status (which is actually a main purpose of these markers).
I beg you to stop visually ruin the IDE for the sake of today’s design trends. Please don’t end up as MS Outlook 2013 which is now a chaotic set of letters and monochrome icons on white background.
To summarize, please:
1) Do not remove backgrounds for the separate screen areas.
2) Do not change colors that have to be semantically bright.
3) Make design changes theme-dependent, so users who like the old L&F could continue use it.
Thank you.
P.S. Also I liked the eye icon checking my files :))
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Alexander, thanks for your feedback!
As a UI designer for IntelliJ IDEA, I am sincerely sorry that the recent changes brought inconvenience to you. Every change we make is for a reason, not just a trend. The changes are first tested and polished inside our development team and only then get to be released. Given the complexity and diversity of our user interfaces, we miss some moments (we work hard to not to). If we could see the particular problems you describe, it would help us greatly to better understand and correct them. Could you please attach the screenshots?
Olga, thanks for the quick response.
Now I have only latest version installed so for comparison I took screens from the IDEA Help so I don't know from which of previous versions them taken.
The side bar problems:
1) No backgroung - markers and code lines overlap, in some cases when the code is highlighted the marker may become hardly noticeable.
2) Exclamation mark and version control markers are just hanging in the air.
3) New "red" and "yellow" which are now more like brown and orange and harder to distingush when the line is narrower and flat.
4) Please explain the rule when inspection indicator become eye or pause icon?
If for consistency you are going to make all scrollbars transparent the interface will become even more difficult to read.
The inspection menu:
1) Color markers without border and with few space between them are blurry on white background on some monitors.
Syntax:
1) Colon and semicolon got new default highlighting color making them look like erronious one.
I let you know if I find more in the new days.
Thank you for your job, Alexander
One more thing: TODOs highlighting.
The new color is really nice I agree, but it is not as noticeable as it used to be. One more place where you beautify the IDE by the cost of the functionality and usability.
Kind regards, Alex
Horisontal tabs separator is hardly visible when multiline.
Thanks!
>4) Please explain the rule when inspection indicator become eye or pause icon?
Eye is when code analysis is in progress, pause is when the analysis process is paused by some other process like indexing.
Could you please attach a screenshot with TODO colors?
I tend to agree with the original post. I know it is difficult to keep multiple look and feels in the product, so I can live with most of the changes. There is one color change that I really need to make, but I can't find it the setting.
The right-hand scrollbar used to have very clear indicators of changed code (from VCS). Now, it is very subtle and and on a grey editor background, it is invisible:
You can barely see the green 'added' lines indicator. The modified line indicator disappears since I have a greay background.
If you select the text, the indicators show up more:
Any info on where these colors are set? I found plenty of colors for the left gutter. Maybe there is a scrollbar background color setting like the left gutter has?
Hi Olga,
Here the screenshot, the new color is less noticeable, and the sidebar marker almost invisible especially while overlaping with text due to background absence.
Best regards, Alex
Alex, thanks for the screenshot!
While we are thinking on how to improve, I can recommend a couple of settings.
— Markers area background can be changed to opaque with a registry option:
— ToDo color can be changed in Settings | Editor | Colors & Fonts | General | ToDo defaults.
Regarding:
> Colon and semicolon got new default highlighting color making them look like erronious one.
Do you mean font color or background highlighting? Couldn’t find any difference with the previous version.
Thanks!
Hello, Mike!
Color of the VCS markers in the scrollbar can be changed in Settings | Editor | Colors & Fonts | Diff — look for the "Stripe mark color" setting.
Does this exist for Windows as well? If so, where can I find it?
Thanks!
Rob
Sure! In the main menu, use Help | Find Action, then type "Registry" in the search box — it should show up the "Registry..." item that will open this dialog.
Ah! I saw "registry" and thought "Windows registry", but then saw a Mac in the screenshot and assumed "Mac registry" (if such a thing even exists). So I opened the Windows registry and searched for "transparent.scrollbar" and found nothing :^O
This worked like a charm. Thanks very much!
Rob
First, thanks to the JetBrains team for making such a wonderful product available to the community.
Is there any chance of a "bumpy" option in 14.2?I agree with Alexander regarding the flatness. For me at least, 14.1 is less pleasant to use than 14.0, specifically because of the new look and feel in the editor.
Hi, Charles!
Thank you for the nice words!
What changes in the editor make it less pleasant to use? Could you please clarify what you mean by "bumpy"?