in-game mod interface UX improvement: arrow keys and spacebar are usable to enable/disable installed mods

Post your ideas and suggestions how to improve the game.

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slippycheeze
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in-game mod interface UX improvement: arrow keys and spacebar are usable to enable/disable installed mods

Post by slippycheeze »

Executive Summary
  • I find another crash-to-desktop, and report it to Wube.
  • Rseding91 is annoyed by my save file with 179 mods in it.
  • I want to reduce the set of mods.
  • I have to painfully point and click to enable or disable mods.
  • I find a mod conflict, or in-game bug, and want to bisect to the pair of mods causing it, because it isn't discovered with faster heuristics or debug data.
  • I want to turn off 179/2, 90, mods in the first pass.
  • I have to painfully point and click 90 times, because I only have bulk "all on" or "all off" controls.
  • I have to do this another 8 times on average to find the pair causing the problem.
What ?
A standard GUI convention is that you can toggle a checkbox with the spacebar. This does not work in the "Mods > Manage" list of mods.

I can already scroll through the list with the keyboard arrow keys, so adding the conventional "spacebar toggles" would round out the set, and make it possible to much more efficiently deal with my (regrettable?) life choices.
Alternative: much bigger "click" area for toggling mods
A large part of the reason I want this is because the checkbox is super-fiddly to hit right now. See my wonderful illustration:
factorio - checkbox is hard.png
factorio - checkbox is hard.png (45.67 KiB) Viewed 1250 times
The blue area is a trap, as in, if you click it you select the row, not toggle the checkbox. The checkbox itself is smaller and harder to hit. If clicking anywhere in the table cell that holds the checkbox toggled it, it'd be far less difficult to use the mouse for this.

Not my main suggestion because (a) I like the keyboard better for this task, and (b) keybind is almost certainly simpler to implement, while delivering IMO the exact same value.
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Re: in-game mod interface UX improvement: arrow keys and spacebar are usable to enable/disable installed mods

Post by eradicator »

The best way I've seen this case handled in other programs is by allowing left-click + shift-left-click to allow selecting a sub-range of entries, and then having (left-click on the checkbox | spacebar) toggle all currently selected items at once.
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