It is only preliminary, but @kmikkels and I have a (barely functional) tri-lingual Gramps terminology cross-reference. It links terms to the various localized Gramps Glossaries. It is intended to be a tool to help people navigate Weblate to suggest translation improvements.
Here it is with the baseline English plus the German and French equivalencies selected:
And single-language (translation mode. With the option to show a column with the Wiki anchor:
It is very doable to dynamically update the shortcuts in the Gtk File Chooser to be synchronized with changes to the Media Path. And other paths that you might want exposed.
Another point: ensure that the citation page column (which is what is interesting in a citation) is displayed at least as wide as the source column in the citations tabs:
Note: This is not the Citation Title (Titre) but the Source Title in first column, it could be after citation page and date columns like author, editor, …
The best layout IMHO could be: Date (of citation), (Citation) Page, Source Title, Source Author, … (any other Source fields)
Hooray, a voice of sanity! The number of mouse clicks needed to add or edit basics facts, for example a marriage date, is pretty absurd.
I’m late to the discussion but I agree with a few points already mentioned.
Filters - at the moment to create a simple filter in the Person view that shows the parents and children of a family I need to go in the Family view, create a filter for that family Id, then go back to the Person view and set the filter to filter by that Family filter. Its a round about way to do this and could use an overhaul.
Citations - I know this has been discussed before, I am on board with taking steps towards supporting citations from outside tools. The reason I don’t currently use other tools is because it causes me to do a duplication of work.
Places - places are very powerful in gramps already but one aspect that has tripped me up is when you search for places in the event editor it does not show you the alt-names. This is problematic when you create place objects with historical alt names.
UI clicks - I know this is mentioned often. I actually like the Gramps UI very much but anything to reduce clicks is appreciated. One that I particularly find annoying (and will submit a PR for) is in the Family Editor when double-clicking a child it brings up the Child Referenc Editor instead of the Person Editor. I feel the Child Reference Editor should only pop up when you double-click cells in the Maternal or Paternal columns.
This is intentional and consistent with the rest of the UI. The subject does get raised now and again though.
I understand it may be intentional but I am not sure I agree it is consistent.
In the Family Editor (and most other areas of the UI) when you click on objects in a list you get the appropriate editor for that object.
For the following tabs in the Family Editor, when you click any of the objects in the tabs list you get their respective editors:
Note → Note editor
Attribute → Attribute editor
Source Citation → Citation editor
Event → Event editor
Child → Child Reference Editor → Person editor
The only one in the list that is different is that last one.
In case you were not aware, middle mouse button on the child will open the Person Editor for the child
Notes, Attributes and Citations don’t have reference objects.
When you click on an Event the Event Reference editor opens, not the Event editor. When you click on a Media item in the Gallery it is the Media Reference editor that opens. The children are linked through reference objects.
The alt-names were originally shone in the list but some users felt the list got to be too busy especially on places download using GetGOV with not only alt-names but also the name in other languages.
However, you can search for the place record by the alternative name. And a trick searching by alternative names search for “,placename” The alt-names are separated by a comma, no spaces.
Notes, Attributes and Citations don’t have reference objects.
When you click on an Event the Event Reference editor opens, not the Event editor. When you click on a Media item in the Gallery it is the Media Reference editor that opens. The children are linked through reference objects.
Okay, I see how that makes sense in the context of the other reference editors.
In case you were not aware, middle mouse button on the child will open the Person Editor for the child
Thanks for the tip. I also realized now there is a right-click action to open the Person Editor as well.
6 years and I am still learning new ways to use Gramps.
I suspect that the part that feels inconsistent is:
The other Reference Editors have 2 subsections each with tabs across the top of each subsection:
Perhaps @riskysnail could take a swipe at a redesigned Child Reference Editor to follow the same pattern?
Note that the header of the Person editor already has a quick-entry mix of fields. It not only contains what would be in the general tab, but also a subset of fields from the Name object editor for the Primary Name. So the General tab for the Shared information would be pared back very severely… having only the Gender, ID, Tags and Privacy.
It makes sense to swap the order of the Names and Events tab in the v2 Child Reference Editor… but have all the rest in the same order as the Person Editor.
Why doesn’t the editor open both at the same time, as with events or media: at the top the reference to the family, at the bottom the person?
If you click on an event in the Event category list, you open the Event editor.
If you click on an event in the Person editor, you open the Event Reference editor, but this editor is a combination of event reference and event, where you can directly edit both the reference value (Role) as well as the event itself.
If the Family editor were consistent with this, then clicking on a child would bring up an editor, where you could edit both the refrence values (Parent roles) as well as the child itself.
I think that the most problematic thing about Gramps is the number of clicks and windows that are needed to input data. This is directly related to editors being (pretty much) in one to one correspondence with data objects.
This is much discussed in GEPS 034: Improve usability.
A couple of the most pertinent comments are Reduce the number of editors (with a pertinent and good example), and the discussion about Subsurface which had similar UI problems (ignore other issues) and solved them by migrating from Gtk to Qt, which supported edit-in-place much better.
@dsblank Perhaps you could get AI to summarise these suggestions (many of which are very good) and add then as new sections in GEPS 034: Improve Usability.
The best addition to Gramps (as opposed to improvements to what is already there) would be to (re-)implement what Geves (which seems to be abandonware) did.
The Geves website is archived at Geves - The Genealogy Software
The most relevant point is at step 3 of the Quick Tour, where it explains that after using the build-in web browser, when a suitable source is found, “it can be downloaded with a single button click, and all Source Document boxes will be filled in automatically and any original images downloaded.”.
This is similar to the current Forms add-on, but completely different. With the Forms addon, you manually read the form and type in all the fields. With the Geves approach, the fields are automatically scraped and filled in by the application.
Similarly, with the suggested PDF fillable forms, you fill in the form and then Gramps scrapes the data. With the Geves appraoch, it automatically scrapes the data from the source webpage.
Apologies for being negative again but strongly suspect it got abandoned because like all scrapers they have no capability to distinguish between the good, the bad, and the transcriber error, you can spend longer checking and correcting errors than you would typing it in from scratch when at least you know the guilty party when you have a transcription error.
phil
I kinda agree with Phil. It would need to be highly configurable to allow what you want captured and be less work than my current work flow. I can copy a citation in three mouse/key operations now and I seldom save images because they are often not there or I can’t read them. It would also need to interpret the screen images of many web sites with different screen layouts. I had the same idea, but shelved the idea as it would be too hard to configure and support.
