Decimal tab stop in results column
under review
Jasper Lai
It’d be really nice if results in the right sidebar were aligned using a decimal tab stop, rather than just left-aligned.
Not sure how tricky implementation would be, but this would make place values line up (if the user is using a font with tabular figures), which I find super helpful.
(While I’m here, I’ll just voice again that I think tabular figures are a more sensible default than proportional figures—even if not for the editor, definitely for the results sidebar.)
D
Dave
I would love to see this feature and in fact it is really kind of essential from a usability point of view. Currently I am using CalcTape and would like to move away from it as it does not really get any feature updates, but one of the things it does right is decimal point alignment. See here: https://www.schoettler-software.com/en/calctape/mac
Zac @ Soulver
Did a bit of experimenting with this today. Only really works with monospaced fonts like Menlo and Courier though:
Mike Schinkel
Zac @ Soulver: Nice!
Jasper Lai
Zac @ Soulver: Funky!
Curious to know why only monospaced fonts, though. Are you having to artificially insert leading spaces?
I know UIKit has
tabStops
, but no clue what the situation’s like on macOS, let alone how one might go about implementing it.The biggest issue I can think of with true tab stops is that there’s no 100% reliable character you can use for alignment:
- Decimal separator doesn’t always appear in results;
- Could align to non-breaking space, but result needs to have a unit, and that unit can’t be a rate.
You could use a combination of right, left and decimal tab stops, but that gets complex. Another way is to to have a two-column table with value and unit in different columns, but I assume that causes trouble with resizing and truncation. 😕
(In the image I put in the original post, I cheated by putting a transparent
.
between 58
and min
.)Zac @ Soulver
Jasper Lai: Yeah exactly. There is tab stop API available on macOS too, but like iOS, it's only applicable to stying paragraphs in a shared text area. The answer column is a column of separate labels - so we can't use tab stops here. Inserting leading spaces where required in front of a label was the only thing I could think of so far, but this will only work for certain fonts.
Zac @ Soulver
under review
Good idea
Jasper Lai
I thought about suggesting another left tab stop (after the decimal tab stop) so units would line up too, but that struck me as feature creep and encroaches on spreadsheet territory—perhaps overkill for Soulver.