Terminal Tribulations - A case study in how not to develop software
Almost a year ago I opened a bug in bugzilla about how the (then) newly added close buttons on tabs severely impacted the usability of of the gnome-terminal. It is trivially easy to accidentally close a session when clicking on a tab to select it. *poof* Away goes your data.
Apparently it's more important to have the clickety user friendly close buttons on display than it is to fix a severe usability issue like that. And it appears to be the plan to eventually come up with some sort of heuristics to determine whether it's safe to close a tab or not. Meanwhile the users of the application will just have to suffer the consequences in the holy name of User Interface Guidelines.
Now that's an interesting software development methodology. Add the GUI button first. Solve any functional effects it may have on users of said application at some undetermined time in the future.
If I prioritized like that at work, I'd be out of a job!
I think it's great that the Gnome people are working user interface consistency. But it is a very immature development methodology to put interface consistency above user data safety.
There are several reasonable suggestions from many people posted in the bug ticket. There's a patch to remove the offending close buttons. And yet, today a new version of gnome-terminal was released. I'm glad to report that absolutely nothing has been done to alleviate the problem.
Thankfully I'm smart enough to patch the gnome-terminal I am running...
← back