Brainstorming ticket: richer toast notifications

[ianfixes]

This is less of an individual feature request and more of an open discussion about what might be enabled by improving the toast notifications.

For clarity, I'm talking about these:

Existing feature

At the moment, these are used to capture a few very useful pieces of information. Among them:

• You have just changed spaces; here is the layout being used on this space
• You have just changed layouts; here is the new layout being used.
• You have just asked Amethyst for information about what layout you are using

Suggested feature

Other pieces of information that might be valuable to present in this notification:

• A list of all defined shortcuts, similar to what GitHub shows you when you press ? on a page (requested on gitter)
• A visual representation of the layout style itself
  • An icon with the general shape of the layout -- AwesomeWM has some good ones
  • Some information about the parameters of the layout, like how many main panes there are or (if implemented) a zoom feature
  • A small animation about what modification to the layout was most recently applied (e.g. showing how the layout gains a main pane), also mentioned as part of the zoom feature
• A visual representation of what hotkey was just received

What are some pros and cons of each of these? What set of features would best enable either discoverability of current features or usability of more complex features?

All ideas welcome.

[d1rewolf]

I really, really love the idea of having a list of all defined shortcuts. This would be absolutely indispensable to me, as I'm still learning amethyst and am constantly bringing up preferences or my notes to view shortcuts...

[jameswritescode]

I had the same issue as #998 recently where I'd used mod1 + , several times without really understanding what I was doing. I nearly decided to give up on using it because I thought the tall layout was broken on my main screen

In general it might be nice to have main pane count in the layout toast when prompted

A list of all defined shortcuts

Another option could be a toast that displays possible next keys when it detects a modifier being used

e.g. hitting mod1 presents a list of

• , - Increase main pane count
• . - Decrease main pane count
• H - Shrink mane pane
• L - Expand main pane
• ...

A visual representation of what hotkey was just received

Hitting a combo toasting like "Increase main pane count" could be constructive for people just starting with Amethyst, giving an option to disable them

[ianfixes]

It looks like we've had this feature basically ready to go for some time now but it was never completed...

There's already a field in the toast called layoutDescription and it's set in displayLayoutHUD():

layoutNameWindow.layoutDescriptionLabel?.stringValue = currentLayout?.layoutDescription ?? ""

And the PanedLayout class already presents the info we want to see (although in a more rough-cut way, with other info):

    /// The default debug layout description for paned layouts. It describes the ratio and number of main pane windows.
    var layoutDescription: String {
        return "(\(mainPaneRatio), \(mainPaneCount))"
    }

I'm not sure why it's not getting applied though. There's the base layout class and the Tall layout class both supplying an empty string for this. Is it overriding the PanedLayout class?

// class Layout
var layoutDescription: String { return "" }

//class TallLayout
override var layoutDescription: String { return "" }

In any case, it looks like this can be solved by just adding screenManager.displayLayoutHUD() in WindowManager.swift (or displayLayoutHUD in ScreenManager.swift). How should the description read?

[maho]

I second that list of keys would be killer feature for me. I constanly forget list of keys.

[keighrim]

It'd be lovely to show currently focused app name in the toast when focus shifts (to other window, other monitor, or other desktop)

[rcarmo]

I like this. Yes please.

[yougotwill]

I use https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/pull/528 with the amethyst menu bar icon hidden. So it would also be useful to have toasts when you enable and disable tiling.