At some point, kate started to show messages at the top/right corner of the editor window. That was already bad UX. Recently (since 18.08.0 at least, and still present in 18.12.3), it moved the message to the middle of the editor window. This is even worse. The middle of the editor window is an area where you focus. It's not unlikely that the message covers the area at your current cursor position. The old message was annoying, but could be ignored because it was in the corner. Now it's, well, harder to ignore. What really upsets me is that the message keeps its own timeout, so it won't go away when you move the cursor around or so. The alpha fade-out reminds me of chinese water torture similar to cursor blinking. It's just got to make you wait for a second to stress its own importance, right? I don't just want to nag. There have been significant improvements to UX in kate in the recent years. But this is just bad and I really wonder what motivated this change to move it to the middle of the editor window at all. Who wants this? I suggest removing these fade-in messages. Put them into some sort of status bar at the bottom instead. Make the message persistent and remove it only on user interaction. (For example searching again would remove the message that the search wrapped. No timeouts.)
This was changed back to the old style in 19.04, and now it's in the corner again so it doesn't impede your view. I feel like it would be even more annoying if they didn't time out. The "search wrapped" message for example. If that didn't time out on its own, it would be just sitting there annoying you until you remembered to dismiss it. Also I think this may be the first time I've heard an animated fade-out compared to "Chinese water torture." :)
Whatever we do someone always complains. The message was moved to the center, because someone complained that the message in the corner is often unnoticed. When it was moved to the center, we got complaints that it was too visible and annoying. Now we moved it back to the corner. You can be sure of one thing: if we move it to the status bar, there will be people complaining that the previous behavior was better.
Indeed. I personally feel like the corner is a sensible compromise. These messages are low-importance so ideally if you miss them, nothing bad happens. Anywhere that's not the case, it probably means that we should be using a more visible notification UI, like a KMessageWidget that does require manually dismissing it, or even a pop-up dialog box.
Note that Sublime and vim do the same what I suggested: they have a dedicated place on the bottom of the editor window (outside of the text area) that displays status messages, and they're persistent. So my suggestion can't be so wrong. Anyway, it's good that the message was moved back into the corner. I still dislike it, but oh well. > Whatever we do someone always complains. That's true for almost 100% of user facing changes in anything.