Rework SetupDialog GUI

[regulus79]

Enhancement Summary

The current setup dialog/settings window feel a bit cluttered, especially with all the miscellaneous settings on the very first tab, and no way to search.

Additionally, since there are a lot of settings (particularly in the first tab), the user has to scroll down to view all of them. But, because we have those extremely wide combo boxes, the user can easily accidentally change them as they scroll. And then when trying to put them back to their original state, it can be easy to forget what it was in the first place. Was it "Dual-button" or "Grab Closest"? Or was it "Handles"? I wish I didn't accidentally have my mouse there when I was scrolling!

Additionally, there is no way to reset the settings to the defaults.

Implementation Details / Mockup

I think we should:

• Make the combo boxes less wide, so that the user can scroll without changing them.
• Add a way to search the settings
• Add a way to reset the settings
• Add more categories for organizing the settings, especially the miscellaneous settings on the first page

Please search the issue tracker for existing feature requests before submitting your own.

• I have searched all existing issues and confirmed that this is not a duplicate.

[headquarter8302]

Bumping this since I also have issues whenever I try to edit settings. Maybe we can take notes from other FOSS projects? E.g. KDEnlive?

[AW1534]

Bumping this since I also have issues whenever I try to edit settings. Maybe we can take notes from other FOSS projects? E.g. KDEnlive?

I like musescore's quite a bit. Each page is clearly defined and only contains a few options. It's really easy to find what you're looking for.

[AW1534]

It might be worth having an "advanced" tab, and hiding away options like sample rate, buffer size, working directory and maybe even audio interface in there.

Also, it should be made clearer exactly which options require a restart (maybe a red asterisk next to those options), and ideally a pop-up when you change something requiring a restart prompting the user to save and restart, restart or ignore.

The plug-in paths system needs an overhaul, but that’s probably a separate issue.

Make the combo boxes less wide, so that the user can scroll without changing them.

I think we need to completely stop scrolling over combo widgets from changing the selected option. I looked into this a while ago because I was annoyed by it too. I looked into it a while ago because I was annoyed by this too, and it's a bit annoying to do (requires a whole child class inheriting from QComboBox) but it's possible

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I propose we have the following pages:

• Audio
• Midi
• Plug-ins (all the plugin path options)
• Appearance (theme, background artwork, smooth scroll, etc)
• Autosave
• Miscellaneous (soundfont path, default soundfont, GIG path and everything else that doesn't fit into the other categories)
• Advanced (sample rate, buffer size, working directory and maybe even audio interface)