| Summary: | Alignment issues in tables | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Applications] plasma-systemmonitor | Reporter: | Alois Wohlschlager <alois1> |
| Component: | general | Assignee: | KSysGuard Developers <ksysguard-bugs> |
| Status: | CONFIRMED --- | ||
| Severity: | normal | CC: | ahiemstra, colinderoos, kde, kdedev, nate, plasma-bugs-null, rpc |
| Priority: | NOR | ||
| Version First Reported In: | 5.21.5 | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | openSUSE | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed/Implemented In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
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Description
Alois Wohlschlager
2021-05-21 09:52:37 UTC
Agreed. Ksysguard actually has an alignment hardcoded for each field, e.g cpu usage is still centered. IMO it's visually cleaner to center numerical values as much as possible as it prevents huge whitespace gaps between wide columns, especially when you have a text column to the left of a numeric column. KSysGuard's column alignment always felt totally random to me. The Name and MAC Context columns (text) are left-aligned, but the Username column (text) is centered. The CPU column (numeric) is centered but the PID and Memory columns (numeric) are right-aligned. And so on. While centering everything may look a bit cleaner, there are downsides as well. When numerical values are right-aligned, it is very easily visible which number is bigger (and in fact most proportional fonts still have equal-width digits to support this). In the context of the system monitor, I can easily spot the memory hogs. Centering (or left-alignment) makes this harder. Maybe this is not as relevant for PID (which is just an identifier and not a size indicator) or CPU (as it is very short). For the command column, some programs (e.g. postgres) have whitespace padding at the end of their command lines, so centering does not really work anyway. With username, centering is probably not too bad. In general, I think it is a common expectation (from other system monitors, spreadsheet applications or the real world) that English text is left-aligned and numbers are right-aligned. When this expectation is broken, there should be a compelling benefit. Finally, I don't think centering everything even solves huge whitespace gaps, at least not as much as a reasonable column width and column order do. Fair enough. It's not something I feel super strongly about. This seems to have fallen by the wayside, but I think it's still worth considering. In other contexts, numbers with decimals are usually justified on the decimal. I agree that numbers being center aligned looks weird. I agree, especially the `Command` column need to be left aligned. The numbers should in my opinion be right-aligned, and perhaps with a fixed number of (1) decimals. |