Revamping yast2-users UI: an initial proposal

[dgdavid]

Context

As @joseivanlopez mentioned in the "Revamping yast2-users" thread in the yast-devel mailing list, we would like to redesign its [the yast2-user] UI completely.

Reality

However, after some experiments and discussions, looks like there is no much room for revolutionary changes such us unifying form tabs, using a multi-column form to make better use of available space and so on. Instead, few changes here and there seems to be all we need to improve the yast2-users UI without making it unreadable when running in an 80x24 terminal.

Proposed changes

Although still a work in progress and this issue is subject to be updated in the incoming days, below are most of the initial proposed changes.

• Main Dialog

  • Leave only the "Users" and "Groups" tabs. The content of the other two can be moved" to a "Settings" dialog.
  • Use a popup instead of a combobox to set the filters. It allows to reduce the redundacy and to make filter combinations more discoverable.
  • Include more relevant information in the table, but keeping it short enough to avoid horizontal scroll. For example, the type of user, if it is sudo or not, a visual mark if there are changes not applied yet, etc.
  • Remove the "Expert options" combobox. "Password Encryption", "Login Settings", and "LDAP User and Group Configuration" can be placed in the Settings dialog mentioned above. "LDAP Search Filter" could be included in the filters popup. "Write Changes Now" can be placed in a MenuBar

• The MenuBar

  Similar to what we did recently in the Partitioner, the module could have a top menu bar to place there the access to available options instead of populating the UI with buttons.

  Thus, an initial but not too elaborated proposal could be

  • File
    • Save/Apply (write changes now, without exiting)
    • Abort (Abandon Changes)
    • Finish (Save/Apply & Exit)
  • Item
    • Add (a new user or group)
    • Details (displays a summary of current selected item)
    • Edit (current selected item)
    • Delete (current selected item)
  • View
    • Settings

• User form

  Basically, keep it as it is with just small improvements. For example:

  • Avoid breaking the tab navigation because of a field validation. It's annoying.
  • Displaying, when editing, all selected additional groups in a sentence. I.e., "docker, systemd-journal, users, and vboxusers". Or even "docker, systemd-journal and 2 more" when the list length is quite large and does not fit in one line
  • Moving additional groups selection to a new dialog, which should use a two sides multiselect widgets.
  • Use better name and buttons/labels wording for "Plug-Ins" tab

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Other related links

• https://gist.github.com/dgdavid/fb38e1cdab7e86c31ac0c7949cb174ea - Some discussed mock-ups.
• https://gist.github.com/dgdavid/043d323f9e22599d5ded88ee986f456a - Some popup based mock-ups (discarded).
• https://github.com/yast/yast-users-ng/issues/8 - Some UI limitations found.