Fade pane tab labels rather than truncating with '...'

[wayfaringrob]

Sym... Mo... Lab... Geo... Ele...

With many functions now living in panes, it's not uncommon to have several open at a time as you map. One pain point here is that if you have them all stacked like this, as I prefer to have them, they become really hard to distinguish. Not impossible, but I believe this could be better handled.

The '...' used to truncate is wasted, indistinguishable space. The point of the tab labels is to help you distinguish between them, and by having the same ... on each of them, it defeats the purpose. One solution, as is done in Firefox, would be to fade the text into the end of the tab, reveal just a bit more of it:

A few more characters can make a difference when you're trying to quickly identify the tab you're looking for. Firefox also limits how narrow a tab can get, implementing a horizontal scroll mechanism that works very well. I know Pro's icon set gets a ton of hate, but it might not be bad to have an optional 'Icon tabs' setting that would replace the tab name with an icon. In that case, it may be better to move the tabs to the side, as they are in 'unpinned' tabs, to avoid taking up even more vertical space than the Pro UI already does -- kind of how toolboxes in Adobe products are handled -- when they're text, they're on top, and when they're icons, they go to the side.

[Anonymous User]

Agree! I was watching a video of someone and they had so many panes open all you could see was the first letter! C...S...M...C...A... I thought, wow, they must have memorized which pane they have where!

What's really interesting is that as I do some of the ArcGIS Pro training available out there on https://learn-arcgis-learngis.hub.arcgis.com/ I think Esri intends users to close a pane every time they are done with a task. Can anyone at Esri confirm?

For example, change symbology of one feature class - ok, now close the pane. Create a new point? - open the Create Features pane, create the point, close the Create Features pane. I find this concept completely unrealistic and not at all how I have intuitively used the software. So many extra clicks and so slow to do it that way.

But if you closed those panes all of the time I suppose you would never have this problem. But I usually end up with your screenshot also  😊

[wayfaringrob]

@Anonymous User  if that's the expected way to work, omg, very out of touch with how users actually work & productivity. why on earth would I want to constantly close and reopen panes, especially when most of them open from unintuitive places? I want stuff to stay put, and Pro is bad enough at that.

[wayfaringrob]

Like, as much as they want to make GIS seem like a linear workflow, it NEVER is. Not at all. There's going to be back and forth.

[wayfaringrob]

Eek. After years of being spoiled with two large monitors, I work primarily on 13 to 16" laptops these days. With less room to expand panes, this is even more of a drag on efficiency. ArcMap at least had icons in addition to text, which would be a good first step. In the long run, I wonder if panes really are the best solution for some of the things that live here now.

[KoryKramer]

Preview of ArcGIS Pro 3.4 

[AndreaB_]

@KoryKramer  whooo hoo! Looks great! Looking forward to it.

[wayfaringrob]

sick!

[KoryKramer]

There is no plan to fade pane names. Instead, in ArcGIS Pro 3.4 we added icons. Go to Your Ideas in ArcGIS Pro 3.4 to see other ideas implemented this release and check out the What's New help to learn about everything that is new and improved in ArcGIS Pro 3.4.

[wayfaringrob]

@KoryKramer  That's too bad. I think the icons are an improvement, but they also take up more space, causing even more truncation than before. Repeating '...' over and over and over in an area that is soooo tight on space adds precious seconds to legibility and comprehension every time you look at one. Icons are a step in the right direction but there are still far too many drags on efficiency.