One of the advantages of self hosting is you can tweak the interface. I have made a few changes which I think use the available screen space more economically among other things. This is especially important if users have computer screens with lower resolution, which is common in developing countries.
The downside is that every time there is an update, I have to manually re-apply the changes to some of the css and Typescript files. Although I have it pretty down pat now, I would obviously love some of these to be incorporated into main Grist.
This post is basically to gauge if there is any interest from other users, or if they are just my own preferences.
Here is a working copy using the Project Management template demonstrating the changes:
Open Project Management
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Table Row Number - narrow width to fit numbers up to 9999. Most of my tables have less than 100 rows, so there is a wasted space on every table. Ideally this column could expand to accommodate Table widgets showing huge numbers of records.
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Table Add Column - hide this unless you are the owner as it is just wasting space and causing horizontal scrolling sooner than necessary. Ideally this would show/hide depending whether you have permission to modify the access structure.
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Collapsed Widgets - changed the fixed widget bar at the top of the screen so it is collapsed by default, but expands on mouse hover. A green line shows if the page has collapsed widgets. This way you get back the whole section currently used by the collapsed widgets bar, which may only have one or two widgets in it and be mostly empty space.
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Search Widget - Name a Table widget ā
SEARCHā and collapse it so it sits in the collapsed widget bar. When you click on the widget, it will automatically move focus to the search box so users can immediately start typing their search string. I find users often didnāt see the green magnifying glass - it also saves a mouse click.
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Tables sort order in Access Rules - currently, access rule tables are displayed in the order they first have a rule applied to them. This becomes a pain when you have many tables with rules and they werenāt added alphabetically. This tweak sorts the tables alphabetically. It is literally changing one value from false to true, so should not be too hard to implement.
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The exact same thing applies to Code View - so I made the same change there too.
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Access Rule Conditions - if you have complex conditions, they donāt currently word-wrap, making it very easy to make simple logical errors. This change just turns on word-wrap, making Access Rules a pleasure to work with again.
Iād be interested to hear peopleās feedback, or ideas for other visual tweaks. I donāt know if there is a voting feature in this community, but perhaps something like:
1-yes, 2-yes, 3-no, 4-no, 5-yes, 6-no, 7-yes and any comments/suggestions.
Regards, David.
