Re: [bug-gtypist] GTypist for Beginners

[Felix Natter]

Tim Marston <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Felix,

hello Tim!

> On 17/12/11 16:34, Felix Natter wrote:
>> Then I will take care of writing the component for the "beginner
>> tutorial" which allows to scroll vertically.
>
> Great. That sounds fantastic.
>
>> Ok, so we have a Scrollbar (only usable via keyboard of course) and
>> "Start typing" (space/enter) and "Don't show this message again (ESC)"
>> (Escape) buttons.
>
> Does ncurses offer anything like a "checkbox" widget? If it does,
> perhaps you could use one of them to say "don't show me this again".

Plain ncurses does not have any widgets. But there is
libform/panel/menu, which you can try out by installing ncurses-examples
and then running:
/usr/lib/ncurses/examples/demo_forms
/usr/lib/ncurses/examples/demo_menus
/usr/lib/ncurses/examples/demo_panels

Menus and forms are not useful for gtypist IMHO (forms has very
unintuitive handling, is overkill for a checkbox widget, does not
work with PDCurses and even seems buggy). 
libpanel does overlapping (sub-)windows (try to enter "c2", then place
the window using 2x SPACE, use "c3" and place that and so on). It might
work with PDCurses (panel.h is available for PDCurses), but I don't
think it supports scrolling within a panel, so I don't see a major
advantage.

=> so I suggest to write this from scratch. Maybe allow navigating
via Tab between the text field (scrolling), the "close" button and
the "close and leave beginner mode" button. Need to think about this
some more ;-)

>> I think another thing that would be nice is to add more colors to
>> the UI (maybe optional). For instance, we could use green+red in
>> drills/speedtests. What do you think?
>>
>> Finally, you could output smileys if a new personal best score is
>> achieved and so on.
>
> Hmm, I don't know about adding more colours (I'm worried it would start
> looking garish!), 

I think we should do this optionally (turned off by default, if you
want). Look at other typing tutors, they all use colors to make training
more fun:
  http://www.tipp10.com/de/screenshots/
  http://ktouch.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
  (maybe ktouch overdoes it a bit)
  http://www.powertyping.com/qwerty/lessonsq.html
  http://www.typingweb.com/typingtutor/
  [...]

I agree that gtypist is mostly used by more experienced typists who may
not like a colorful UI. That's why it should be optional.  

> but I like this idea if a smiley face in the new
> personal best message! Now we're using UTF-8, this should be fairly easy
> to do.

Another idea: We could add some messages like "Well done!" or "You need
to practice more" depending on the correctness percentage. Not
important, but could be done.

> Actually, I've always wanted to re-write the code that draws the
> end-of-lesson "stats box" because it doesn't correctly format line
> widths. For example, if you get >= 10% error rate, the line that shows
> you your error rate is too long! So, I'll also put my name down for
> rewriting the stats box code and I'll add a smiley face to the new
> personal best message while I'm there.

OK, sounds good. We should make sure that the symbol can be converted to
8bit locales.

I wish you (and all other subscribers) a merry christmas.

Best Regards,
-- 
Felix Natter