Clarify the conflict navigators in mergetool
When viewing conflicts in the mergetool, there are two navigation "widgets" in the toolbar at the top of the window. The first one is for navigating the "Pending to solve" conflicts and the second one is for the full set of conflicts. Both of these navigators consist of arrow buttons for stepping back and forth, plus a couple of numbers to indicate which conflict we are looking at. (It is also possible to navigate the conflicts by simply clicking in a conflict block in the text panels, this updates the number indicating which conflict we're looking at.
Now, there are still two tiny pieces of information that I find missing in order to make these navigator widgets clear and easy to use, especially for new users:
Change the first index indicator to something like: "Non-automatic: 2/5 (3 pending)".
Add a label to the second (unlabeled) index indicator, like: "Conflict: 4/9".
Details:
The most important issue here is that, in the current implementation, the numbers (3/5) in the first indicator look precisely the same way as in the second one, BUT it does not work the same way. The first indicator actually says (3 remaining out of a total of 5 non-automatic conflicts) while the second indicator says (you are at index 4 out of a total number of 9 conflicts).
This means that the first indicator is missing a rather crucial piece of information, namely the (you are at index 2) part that is present in the second indicator. This is very confusing since when you press the arrow buttons, the index of all conflicts is updated in the second indicator but (what looks like it would be) the index of non-auto conflicts in the first indicator is not updated (since that number is instead indicating the number of remaining non-resolved conflicts and is only updated when a conflict is resolved).
My suggested change above aims to change the layout and meaning of the first indicator into conceptually this: (you are at index 2 out of a total of 5 non-automatic conflicts, and 3 of these have not yet been resolved).
(Note to staff: This uservoice originated from my private support ticket #8590.)
Göran Wallgren
shared this idea
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Göran Wallgren
commented
There is something missing in a user interface when users have to keep a number in their head while clicking the arrow buttons - "OK, there are 5 non-auto-conflicts, but i don't know which one I'm looking at - I can see that it's nr 4 of the total 9 conflicts but that doesn't tell me much regarding the non-auto ones. I guess I'll hit Prev several times to get to the first one again. Now I'll count them through while hitting Next - 1,2,3,4,5..."