Mint 19 usability issues, Caja, Xviewer issues

[rnclark]

I have upgraded to mint 19 and operations are going smoothly, so thanks to the development team. But some things have been changed and significantly reduce usability. I'm wondering if there is somewhere settings can be changed.

Caja, xviewer: Double click on an image file in caja and the image is brought up in xviewer. It used to be <control> 1 would zoom in to 100% view. This was nice because one can quickly check focus and detail in digital photos using control 1 with one's left hand while keeping the right hand on the mouse. That has been changed to <control> 0. Why???? On every keyboard I use/have seen, <control> 0 is at a greater angle for the right hand than is <control> 1 for the left. For people using a mouse on the right side (majority of people?) that means either moving one's hand off the mouse, to that difficult <control> 0 angle or using two hands for <control> 0. Is there a way to set it back to <control> 1? I regularly review hundreds of images and Caja/xviewer was perfect. It is not any more--now very cumbersome and inefficient.

Caja directory tree: When working down a directory tree, Caja pre mint 19 highlighted the directory you were in. While technically it still does that, the change is so subtle it it is difficult to tell which directory one is in by looking at the tree, Also, the text is light gray on darker gray. The text needs to be lighter for those with reading difficulty (we will ALL be there one day).

Highlighting: I see some weak green highlighting in applications. For example, xreader reading a pdf and trying to search for a word. The highlight is a light green, only changing to a slightly less light green for the word one is on. It is very difficult to see which word one is on when trying to find a specific entry because the highlights and highlight differences are so subtle.

Summary: text and highlighting have been made subtle in Mint 19, significantly degrading usability for me. Is there any way to improve contrast for the above examples, and fix the <control> 0 in xviewer?

[smurphos]

I'm not aware of a method to easily change the default application shortcuts in xapps including xviewer. Maybe a bit awkward but there is always right-ctrl-0 with the left hand, and xviewer supports mouse wheel zoom.

If it really bothers you there are ways and means...e.g something along these lines - https://askubuntu.com/questions/97213/a ... -remapping

Re the theme issues you can just change the theme back to the pre 19 default Mint-X, or any other theme of your choice. The dev team member leading on the stock themes has been taken user feedback on the default Mint-Y on board (you aren't the first!) for the next release with Mint 19.1.

[JosephM]

I don't have Mate installed on this machine. By the directory tree are you talking about the sidebar or the main view?

[gm10]

Summary: text and highlighting have been made subtle in Mint 19, significantly degrading usability for me. Is there any way to improve contrast for the above examples, and fix the <control> 0 in xviewer?

The xviewer shortcuts are hardcoded in the source code. Obviously there should be a way to re-configure them but there isn't at this point. So either recompile from (modified) sources or try to script it like smurphos' suggested.

Regarding the contrast, that's just because Mint's default theme is low contrast (changes already incoming: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3634). With a different theme there are no such problems. E.g. in my case:

Screenshot at 2018-09-08 12-08-53.png

[JosephM]

Unless I'm missing what he's talking about, Nemo doesn't suffer from the issue. That means it needs to be fixed.

[gm10]

Unless I'm missing what he's talking about, Nemo doesn't suffer from the issue. That means it needs to be fixed.

I don't know if you are, don't currently have Nemo to test, but this is an issue with the theme, not caja. Let me illustrate how it looks in caja, I switched to Mint-Y for this:

If you click on a folder in the tree manually, it looks fine:

Screenshot at 2018-09-08 12-39-00.png

However, if you navigate to a folder via the right-hand pane, it looks like this, the only highlight is the triangle for all that my eyes can make out (and why is the text for "Tree" displaced in the dropdown? only just noticed):

Screenshot at 2018-09-08 12-42-57.png

With another theme it highlights just fine in both cases, see my screenshot above. I don't know enough about theming to tell you what you'll have to change but I'm sure you won't need my help for that. Should that change be desired - I don't know what's intentional, but things like that are certainly one of the reasons why I don't use the default themes - the ugly green being another one, also limited icons, missing emblems (you'll notice e.g. my Sources folder in the screenshot is missing its emblem in Mint-Y), probably still missing media key overlay icons (unless you fixed it in the meantime but they were missing at launch).

[JosephM]

Yeah, it properly hilights in Nemo. I'll try to fix that. As for the green... well I can't ditch that That choice was made long before my time. Color variations are planned for Mint-Y though so people will have a choice.

Thanks for nice demo of the problem.

Do you happen to know the name of the emblem you are using on your sources folder?

[gm10]

Do you happen to know the name of the emblem you are using on your sources folder?

metadata::emblems: [draft]

[rnclark]

Thank you everyone. I changed the theme to Mint-X and it looks good -- much better contrast and the directory tree gets highlighted well so it is easy to see where your are.

I've downloaded the source code to xviewer and will change the control-0.