Jenkins : Completed UI Improvements

This page captures old notes that were in UI Enhancements that have since then been implemented.

"Save & leave open" (aka "Apply") button (DONE)
  • A "Save & leave open" button would be great.
    When experimenting with jobs configs, I currently have 3 browser tabs open:
    1. config editor
    2. job page, for just the Build button,
    3. console page.. Currently the Save button closes the editor, so have hit configure to go back to it straight away. (Gergo)

=> This will be implemented in Jenkins version 1.453!

Floating "Save" button (DONE)
  • Would be very nice if some of the "Save" buttons "floated" as you scrolled the page
    so you don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom of a very large config page to save something you changed at the top. (slide)

    And I second Slide's proposal about floating "Save" button. (vladsed)

  • +1 to Slide-o-mix's idea about floating buttons. It would be even better if it could keep you on the page in the same location, as in "save" versus "save and exit".
    In particular, the job configuration and manage jenkins page could use something like this. (Brian J)
  • +1 on floating save buttons (Ann Campell)
  • +1 for fixing the save button, I don't care what method is used as long
    as I can easily find it with out a lot of scrolling. (Mark Donohoe)
  • As said, with a lot of plugins the job configuration page can be very long. The save button is really far far away every time ! (Daniel PETISME)

This is why I thought a "floating" save button would be nice. In reality, something like the floating ToC in some Wiki implementations
might be nice to, so that you could quickly switch between different config sections, and have the save button handy. I think that Trac has the floating ToC option.
(slide)

Why are people so afraid of <ctrl>+<end> (works on Linux and Windows – surely Mac has an equivalent) (wink)
Personally I find floating buttons annoying as they always end up getting in the way of something (which leads to more scrolling, subverting the original reason for it),
or grabbing focus when they shouldn’t. I’m yet to see one done well, where a fixed button would have worked just as well. (telio)

you can also click into an input field, and hit enter, at least this is what I'm doing, when I too lazy to scroll. (Ferenc Kovacs)

That actually is a feature that I would like to get removed from Jenkins. It's always quite annoying for me to navigate to a field, select a value
from my Firefox auto-completion list using the RETURN key and then the dialog is closed automatically by Jenkins even though I want to continue editing (sad)
I think having a shortcut like Jira (ALT-S) would be much better than changing the semantics of RETURN. (Ulli)

If your cursor is within an input, this takes you to the end of the field, not the page.

>> It's always quite annoying for me to navigate to a field, select a value from my Firefox auto-completion list using the RETURN key
and then the dialog is closed automatically by Jenkins even though I want to continue editing.

This is standard web browser behaviour (RETURN/ENTER submits the form), and yes I agree it's very annoying. Some people think that the
standard behaviour should be overridden, others think you should not change standard behaviour. (unknown)

I don't think that this is a standard if you select from a drop down
list. It only is a standard if the text in the textbox has focus.
E.g. in Jira if you select from a drop down box with ENTER then the
selected value is chosen but the form is not closed.
Or in any login dialog (e.g., gmail), when selecting your user name from
the auto-completion in the user field then that value is copied to the
user field on RETURN. The form is not submitted with an empty password
if you press ENTER in the user auto-completion. (Ulli)

Chrome and Safari allow you to choose an auto-completion using return. Only if you press return twice, is the form submitted.
Maybe there is a bug in Firefox? Or you are not supposed to use return to choose from auto-completion list? (Sami)

  • Certainly a keyboard shortcut would be nice for saving the config. If you have such a long config page that scrolling is an issue you could always do control f and search for save. (Charles Murray)
  • Many people seem to want a floating Save button for config page.
    I myself always just hit enter or the key to jump to end of page.
    But I'd appreciate a keyboard shortcut, like in Jira. (Sami)

=> This has been implemented in Jenkins version 1.445!