https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404590
Bug ID: 404590
Summary: ksysguard plot legends do not work well in small
windows
Product: ksysguard
Version: 5.15.0
Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: REPORTED
Severity: normal
Priority: NOR
Component: ksysguard
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
Target Milestone: ---
SUMMARY
When using a smaller ksysguard window (or a window with many plots), sensor
legends are collapsed by dropping sensor labels, which makes them hard to read
unless one knows the color -> sensor association by heart.
For a sufficiently complex plot or a sufficiently small screen, there may be no
ksysguard window size that fits in the screen for which the sensor legend is
readable. This happens much before the plot itself is too small to be readable.
What makes this especially sad is that for many typical plots (e.g. stacked
user/nice/system/iowait CPU load, read/write bandwidth of all drives / network
interfaces), the legend is actually quite redundant and could be shortened by
the user if given the ability to relabel sensors in a fashion that still makes
sense in the context of a specific plot (e.g. in the context of a disk
bandwidth plot "Read accesses device sda (8:0)" can be shortened to "sda
reads").
I can think of several ways to resolve this:
- The configuration cop-out: Let users give sensors a shorter label in plot
legends (would be particularly useful with I/O sensors, whose name is very long
and can usually be shortened in the context of specific plot).
- The hard way: Review sensor names to make them shorter, without becoming
ambiguous, or try to automatically shrink sensor names to adapt them to the
context of a specific plot.
- The UI design trick: Redesign the legend display so that it can scale better
to multiple sensors, e.g. by putting it inside of the graph or judiciously
ellipsing-away a fraction of a sensor's label as the plot size shrinks.
STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Create a new ksysguard tab with room for a few plots (say, a 2x4 grid, which
is otherwise pretty comfortable on a 24-inch screen).
2. Add several I/O sensors to a given plot (say, read/write bandwidth for two
drives, which is a common configuration with SSDs + HDDs these days)
OBSERVED RESULT
The plot's legend is only displayed correctly if the window is maximized. Below
a certain critical size, labels are immediately hidden without prior adaptation
(e.g. putting an ellipsis in a middle). For sufficiently many traces, the
legend may never be displayed correctly at any reasonable window size. It does
not seem possible for the user to reconfigure sensor labels so that they fix on
the screen.
EXPECTED RESULT
Plot legends should scale better with decreasing plot/window size.
SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed, Linux kernel 4.20.7-1-default
KDE Plasma Version: N/A
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.55.0
Qt Version: 5.12.0
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