Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Render setting descriptions as markdown #53911

Closed
roblourens opened this issue Jul 9, 2018 · 1 comment
Closed

Render setting descriptions as markdown #53911

roblourens opened this issue Jul 9, 2018 · 1 comment
Assignees
Labels
feature-request Request for new features or functionality on-testplan settings-editor VS Code settings editor issues ux User experience issues
Milestone

Comments

@roblourens
Copy link
Member

roblourens commented Jul 9, 2018

In the new settings editor, setting descriptions should be rendered as markdown. We should decide when to use quotes, backticks, and links, then make a pass through all settings to make them consistent.

  • Links

    • We can allow arbitrary links in description markdown, or add a documentation field to the settings schema which would be a URL to some docs. Then we can show a "See also" link in a standard location to settings that have this in the settings editor.
    • References to other settings should be links. Clicking the link could search for that setting, and filter the list to just that setting, or scroll to it. (Is that a good experience? How do you go back?) How do we specify a "reference to a setting"? If we scroll to that setting, what happens if the referenced setting is not in the current view (search, scope, "modified only" etc)?
  • Enum descriptions

    • We currently don't show enumDescriptions anywhere. These have useful info but settings are inconsistent. Some settings duplicate this info in their description, some don't. Example of setting with duplicated info: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/src/vs/editor/common/config/commonEditorConfig.ts#L678
    • We should add the enums and enumDescriptions to the bottom of the setting description, and audit all setting descriptions to remove the duplicated info. It should be displayed like this for the new and old settings editors.
    • Some settings have tons of enums and descriptions for all, e.g. files.encoding. We can't show all of them because the description will be very long. The enumDescriptions for files.encoding are very short, just human-readable names for the encodings. For cases like this, I propose a new setting schema property, inlineEnumDescriptions, which will cause us to, in the GUI editor, display the enumDescriptions in the dropdown along with the enum values. Example:

image

  • The reason I won't do this for every setting is that some enumDescriptions have lots of text, and reading it in a dropdown is not a good experience. Example:

image

  • We have to just handle these case-by-case

  • Quotes/backticks

    • I think that all setting names, enum values, keyboard key names, command names, etc should be surrounded by backticks and rendered as code.
@roblourens roblourens added feature-request Request for new features or functionality ux User experience issues settings-editor VS Code settings editor issues labels Jul 9, 2018
@roblourens roblourens added this to the July 2018 milestone Jul 9, 2018
@roblourens roblourens self-assigned this Jul 9, 2018
@itamark
Copy link
Contributor

itamark commented Jul 10, 2018

I prefer the documentation link idea over arbitrary links in markdown. Will make for cleaner code.
Maybe since there might be a requirement for multiple links - a user can change the text of the documentation label to say something like docs and examples or whatever else - and then put the contents they'd normally link to in the external docs.

Oh and also +10000 for showing enumDescriptions somewhere.

roblourens added a commit that referenced this issue Jul 19, 2018
…an 10.

This specifically targets the files.encoding setting.
See #53911
@vscodebot vscodebot bot locked and limited conversation to collaborators Sep 6, 2018
Sign up for free to subscribe to this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in.
Labels
feature-request Request for new features or functionality on-testplan settings-editor VS Code settings editor issues ux User experience issues
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants