[Greasemonkey] Three small Greasemonkey usability feature requests

[Johan Sundström]

Suggesting details is always a can of worms, but it's a sure way of
getting some discussion going. :-)

I'm not specifically looking for indication of scripts that are now
disabled but would have been injected; that was more of a nice side
effect to my other suggestions, if implemented.

> And P.S. .. if that menu is scrolling you've got one heck of a
> lot of scripts installed!

I do; about 40. About half of them I wrote myself and a large chunk of
them apply to just one single site, packaging each distinct change of
behaviour into a script of its own, so other users of the site can
choose their own feature set. I would probably have many many more if
it were not for the user interface problems that results in.

(I first considered suggesting clustering up the scripts by site, but
stopped myself dead in my tracks when I realized I don't care one bit
about scripts for blogger.com when I'm visiting a page at Google, and
would rather be rid of the noise.)

I think having many scripts installed will become all the more common
once people find out about userscript.org, how many great things you
can do (and others have written for you) with Greasemonkey, and that
you are no longer at the sole mercy of content providers, when it
comes to web site user interface decisions.

To recap this thread, a bit -- some UI problems GM faces at the moment:

1) The user interface doesn't scale to more than a small handful of
scripts, say 30, before it loses manageability. Filtering the list
would lessen the impact of the problem by some order of magnitude,
cutting down the list length to those few who match present URL,
rather than "all installed scripts".

  Arguably, this doesn't fix the problem when your count of "catch
all" scripts reaches the magic numner (let's assume 30 for now); that
category (perhaps also including scripts with a catch-all and just a
few @exclude statements) might also eventually need to move to a
submenu, or similar. My 2c says we could leave that until we have
addressed more pressing UI problems.

2) It's difficult to turn GM on/off once the magic threshold has been
reached. This could be solved by magic keybindings, mouse clickery, or
be left as is if the first problem is solved well. (I'd prefer both
problems solved independently of one another, but won't press that
issue. Others may feel differently.)

3) It's equally difficult to get to the "Manage user scripts" dialog.
Basically, 2) restated, in a different use case context.

There is some merit to the counter-thoughts about mixing left click
and double left click behaviours; that might be a rather bad idea.

--
 / Johan Sundström, http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/