SUMMARY Currently the tablet kcm seems to look like bare minimum page. Earlier on x11 the settings page used to show the drawing and button layout properly so that the user understood which button they are mapping to a shortcut. Currently all the buttons are listed as button 1 button 2 button 3 and so on. On a tablet these buttons can have odd numbering so a simple visual indication would be better for usability. This but report is also for showing a drawing or visual representation of the pen buttons. There is also an issue of the pen being names as "tool" while the pen may be called as a tool in the code it doesn;t help a normal user that much. It can be called "Pen button 1" "Pen button 2" and so on instead of "Tool button 1" "Tool button 2" etc. I attaching a screenshot of how it look under X11 STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Open tablet kcm under wayland and check if you can see which button is which on your tablet.
Created attachment 163634 [details] Current kcm showing the page for tablet button mapping. Which shows which button is which by showing us a visual button layout Current kcm showing the page for tablet button mapping. Which shows which button is which by showing us a visual button layout
Created attachment 163635 [details] Current kcm showing the page for pen button mapping. Which shows which button is which by showing us a visual button layout Current kcm showing the page for pen button mapping. Which shows which button is which by showing us a visual button layout
I should note that currently the text gets bold when we press the button on the tablet so this helps in knowing which button is which but a layout would be good in addition to this.
This makes sense, I also don't like the layout of the page (and my tablet has 20 buttons, which is all laid out vertically...) Calling them pen buttons makes much more sense to me IMO, that's an easy change.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1971
Git commit 446d40371474996b82cc8995d4c36d4ede0f5240 by Joshua Goins. Committed on 12/01/2024 at 01:42. Pushed by redstrate into branch 'master'. kcms/tablet: Buttons should be called "pen buttons" The name "tool button" is an underlying technical name and it's much clearer when it's referred to as pen buttons. M +3 -3 kcms/tablet/ui/main.qml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/commit/446d40371474996b82cc8995d4c36d4ede0f5240
Update: we now have libwacom, which means we can do a really easy thing and separate the buttons into columns. This means by 20 button tablet wouldn't be a pain to scroll through. And eventually once we integrate SVGs, it would look more natural around a graphic.