6.2 Introduced excessive padding to Input Controls - wasting valuable screen real estate (and looks horrible as well)

[robcowart]

Kibana version: 6.2.1

Browser version: Chrome, Firefox, Safari

Steps to reproduce:

1. Compare input controls between 6.2.1 and 6.1.3

6.2.1 introduced excessive padding to the input controls plugin, robbing the user of both excessive screen real estate... and it looks horrible to boot.

This was 6.1.3

While you could tweak the location of the labels a little, overall this was good spacing.

This is 6.2.1 (NOTE: the min-width of 250px is also an issue at common monitor resolutions)

This issue of excessive padding has already been raised here... #15594 (although it has been largely ignored). However it appears that instead of fixing the problem, it is spreading to other components. Kibana isn't a website, it is a business app, and should be styled accordingly.

Most important to understand is that almost none of your users have 5K Retina displays. Even optimizing for 1920x1080 is too big for many users, and the current padding and styling choices make it difficult to create useful dashboards even at that resolution. Those users that do have large high resolution displays, have them to get more valuable data on the screen, not waste it with excessive whitespace. Overall it looks like Kibana is moving in the wrong direction in this regard.

I am currently working with a number of customers where I have been forced to recommend to them that they stick to 5.6 until the Kibana issues are addressed. Once they see the negative impact that an upgrade will have on their dashboards they instantly agree. I hope this issue and #15594 sees some attention quickly.

[snide]

The variables at play in user created dashboards are tough to juggle. Almost any change made will have some ripple effect against existing dashboards in the wild. I think you're correct that forms within dashboards should likely be more compact. We'll look into adding it at our base layer.

[ThomThomson]

Closing this, as the new Controls system has a better use of screen real-estate.