Ways to organize widgets in folder / Label plugin

[arknano]

I use the Labels plugin to create some basic organisation of widgets in a folder. However, this feature has been removed in v1.24.0.

The labels plugin was a bit clunky so I understand the impetus to remove it, however its utility seems worth keeping for what I assume is a simple to maintain widget.

If restoring the plugin is not on the table, implementing some kind of other way to group and label widgets in a folder would be great.

Thanks for your work on the extension!

[OlegWock]

Hello and thanks for the feedback. I disliked how label widget didn't fit into overall design, so restoring widget as it was before is not an option. I'm open to idea of some ways to aid in organization of the widgets in a folder, but I must be frank this will be far from first priority for me right now. I'll keep this issue open for time being

[arknano]

Yeah, fair enough! I'll have a think and see if i can come up with something that doesn't suck - do you have some kind of style guide/design document for the expected behaivour of anori I can align with? Just so I don't go barking up the wrong tree in... MS Paint, probably :D

[OlegWock]

I don't have any kind of documentation on design, it was just "go by feel", as most of the time, I'm only one working on the extension. So unfortunately, I don't have anything to share with you. All I can offer is my rationale on why previous version of label plugin was removed. Main problems were

1. It occupied too much space (for its purpose). Board in Anori split into tiles and each widget takes at least 1x1 on this tiles grid. For label widget, one tile height was already too much, as even title with description didn't really occupy all available space, so widget looked half-empty. And it usually had to occupy at least two tiles horizontally (one was too small to have any meaningful title which made it look bulky in my opinion
2. It did poor job at actually organizing other widgets. To organize information (i.e. widgets) you need to establish hierarchy. For example, you should clearly see that this is (for example) "Work bookmarks" group (top level entity) and there are individual bookmarks (lower level entity) within it. Due to widgets grid limitation, it was hard to make this hierarchy for couple of reasons.
   • Since size and look of label widget was very similar to other widgets, it didn't feel like higher level entity, it looked just as any other widget in group (unless you make it e.g. very long, but that will also waste quite a bit of space).
   • Very limited ability to separate one group from another one. E.g. where does "work bookmarks" end and "university bookmarks" start. You could keep empty row/column between them as a workaround, but that (imo) requires you to "waste" too much space which could be occupied with useful widgets otherwise

The fact that it had very little use (around 4-5% of users) was final argument for me to remove it.

I have been thinking about something like this, but I still don't like it too much because it doesn't fit well into grid (card touches widgets above, which means we have to increase space between tiles, but that will make it too big for tiles without folders/groups). As well as it requires significant rework to grid system implementation (which is something I wanted to do for some time anyway, but still not highest prio)