Bug#99652: dialog boxes confusing - active choice not clear

[David Whedon <dwhedon@gordian.com>]

> I helped a friend with a B.S. in Computer Science do a Debian install
> yesterday, and he was quite confused at first until I told him that
> the blue choice was active.
I'll agree that it isn't obvious. If you hit tab and cycle through the yes and
no choices it is impossible to figure out which you are choosing.

> 
> I can think of a couple of ways to fix this.  The easiest would
> probably be to not make movement between the Yes/No choices circular;
> i.e. if one hits the right arrow when the active choice is "No", it
> just stays there.  That way, one could, by using a bit of deduction,
> figure out what the active choice is.
Sounds to me like your arrow keys were not working because that is exactly the
arrow key behavior I observe here.

> 
> Another alternative might be to put some sort of indicator under the
> active choice, like '^', '*****', or '---^---', etc.
> 
I don't know how to easily implement this with libnewt (the windowing library
boot-floppies uses).

An easy option which may or may not be any better is to not use the 'compact'
version of buttons for yes/no boxes.  An example of this can be found here:

http://people.debian.org/~dwhedon/yesno_proposed.png

for reference this is what the box looks like now:
http://people.debian.org/~dwhedon/yesno_current.png


Comments?


David

Index: boxes.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/debian-boot/boot-floppies/utilities/dbootstrap/boxes.c,v
retrieving revision 1.49
diff -u -r1.49 boxes.c
--- boxes.c     2001/04/06 16:02:34     1.49
+++ boxes.c     2001/06/02 19:07:09
@@ -324,9 +324,9 @@
     newtTextboxSetText(t1, text);
     height=newtTextboxGetNumLines(t1);
     newtTextboxSetHeight(t1,height);
-    newtCenteredWindow (TWOBOTTONBOX_LEN + 1, height+3, title);
-    b1 = newtCompactButton ( 20, height+2, button1 );
-    b2 = newtCompactButton ( 32, height+2, button2 );
+    newtCenteredWindow (TWOBOTTONBOX_LEN + 1, height+6, title);
+    b1 = newtButton ( 20, height+2, button1 );
+    b2 = newtButton ( 32, height+2, button2 );
     f1 = newtForm(NULL, NULL, 0);
     newtFormAddComponents (f1, t1, b1, b2, NULL);
     ans = newtRunForm(f1);