Default action for double click on a child in a Family view

When I double-click in a Family view on a child, instinctively I expect the child to be edited but it’s the relationship that’s edited.
It seems to me rarer to want to edit the relation than to edit the child.
The right click on a child however displays the edition of the child in first place (which is generally the place of the default action of the double click if one does not use the bolding to indicate it in a context menu).

Obviously the ideal would be to be able to choose the default double-click actions in Gramps but without asking to go that far I think that making the modification for this specific case would simplify the intuitive navigation in the database.

Best regards.

In the Family editor, clicking on the child edits that child’s relationship to the family. But from that edit window, you can select to edit that child’s record.

1 Like

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately for me it’s one click too many too (like accessing the context menu).
I find it uncomfortable when browsing the database.
Whether in the Families view or in the People view.
In the latter, if you double-click on a person it is edited, if you double-click on its marriage (his familiy), the marriage is edited … and there if you double-click on a child it isn’t edited.
On the one hand, it lacks consistency in the use of the double-click and on the other hand it complicates navigation for not much IMHO.
Especially once the child has been edited, you can continue browsing by editing its marriage then its children, etc …

For now, as a palliative, I use Graph View where all the double-clicks (on people and marriage) provide editing … but you have to be precise with double-clicks because there is an action on the single click of people.

Best regards.

1 Like

Try this configuration for a little while…

In the Relationships view, add the following Gramplets to the Sidebar: Pedigree, Descendants & Data Entry

You can navigate & edit the immediate family intuitively in the main panel of the view.

But you can Navigate the Extended family very quickly from Pedigree or Descendants… (Although it would be nice if Descendents had the People hotlinked the same way as in Relationships & Pedigree. With the edit on a right-click.)

But the Data Entry Gramplet is often overlooked for roughing in a Tree. It is really fast to add multiple members of a family from the same source. Once you add the first person with a source, using the Copy Active Data to fill in the same source, birth location, etc. It is great to not have to open 7 dialogs to add 1 person. In a family of 6, that could save open & closing 35 dialogs!

The problem exists in understanding what is being edited from within which view.

In a Family view, the double-clicks open edit windows for that family. And yes, the child relates to the family, but the family needs to know How that child relates to that family. This is different than general information about that child.

That is why I use the Relationship view to do most (if not all) my editing. From that single view, you can easily edit any family of the person or anyone attached to any one of their families. So in that view, when editing a Family, I do not expect to edit a person.

I recognize that each user finds their favorite view to work their tree. But I cannot see a universal change being made to alter this child/family click option.

1 Like

First of all thanks both for your answers.

I must say my last message contains a bad word : “editing” … I meant “give acces to Edit menu” so the Person view but not to do changes.
I was then speaking about and only in a browsing situation to make deductions and so on to prepare for future research.

Yes @emyoulation there are alternatives and the one you give is very helpfull in some cirumstance.
But note that using gramplets add clicks too, tab navigation and don’t always avoid to get multiple windows.
Multiple windows isn’t a problem for me while browsing the database ( i undestand it’s kind different when changing data and so on).
I thought it was intuitive, easy and quicker to just use double-clik to browse the base.

@DaveSch
When you say “The problem exists in understanding what is being edited from within which view.”, you say all.
I must say the way Gramps reuse existing stuffs is very very clever as that avoid “tons” of dialog boxes, reduce the code size and simplify its managment.
The counterpart is it’s (very) difficult to translate that in an intuitive manner inside the interface.
As it is the case here : as you say, yes, it can be considered as logic to get the child relation when we do double-click in Family view but in People view
we expect more the person dialog of the child.
As People view reuses Family view when you double-click a marriage in People view we get the child relation dialog when we double-click a child and not the person dialog.
And as Family, Events, Places, Sources, Citations, Repositories, Media and Notes categories are intuitively interpreted as lists and no more, that doesn’t simplify the challenge to obtain an intuitive interface.

Best regards.

2 Likes

I am new to this group but not a new user of Gramps. I too have always thought it illogical to use double click for opening and editing people in other windows but not do the same for a child in the family window. i know using a right click displays a separate menu however feel this should be the route to access the relationship editor.
For consistency of moving from person to person the default action for double click should be to open the child info page.
I would be interested know what the justification is for the current inconsistent double click action.

Circling back to this after a long time…

Did you know that the middle-button-click is set to do the Edit Person action while the double-click does the Edit Relationship action?

So it is actually 1-fewer clicks to get to that dialog than a double-click.

But you have to remember that it is there.

It is very consistent. The editors allow the user to edit a tree of objects. Double clicking a row in an editor tab invokes an editor for that secondary object.

The “Children” tab in the Family editor displays a list of Child Reference objects so the editor will edit the reference object rather than following the link to the child.

The “Events” tab in the Person editor also edits the Event Reference object rather than following a link to the event.

In a view it would make more sense to click on a child reference and display a person, but not in an editor.

1 Like

@Nick-Hall is right about it being consistent.

In this case, the dialog is a Family Edit dialog, not a person edit dialog. So the primary action should be related to edit the “family” reference characteristics. The reference characteristics for a child are: their relationship to the parents, if the relationship is ‘private’, the citable evidence for those relationships, and any work notes.

Perhaps the confusing part is that when there isn’t any deeper layer of characteristics to explore, then the usual thing is to pop up a regular object editor.

However, it might be arguable to say that this is like the “sharing” reference characteristics layered on top of Events. And the layout of the Family relationships could be layered in a similar fashion. That would eliminate the extra drill-down too.

On the left is a “new” event that is not associated with any Persons yet. And on the right, there is a sharing layer at the top with the Event data below.

Somebody would need to propose a feature request. Doing a layout would help too.

1 Like