Showing posts with label three dots in eclipse menus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label three dots in eclipse menus. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Ellipses (...) conventions in Eclipse

There are lot of discussions on this topic, but there is no official eclipse wiki page which described ellipses standards and conventions which has to be used while developing eclipse products.

Below are the resources which helps us to understand how to use ellipses in eclipse.


As per my understanding, eclipse is mostly following Windows User interface guidelines for ellipses usage conventions.

Below points which helps us to understand in summary.

1. Display an ellipsis if a dialog box is displayed to the user to change/enter information. Omit the ellipses for "show properties", "help" and "about" which are essentially "show" dialogs anyway. No more info is needed for them.

2. While command buttons are used for immediate actions, more information might be needed to perform the action. Indicate a command that needs additional information by adding an ellipsis at the end of the button label
Screen shot of Print command button with ellipses

In this example, the Print... command displays a Print dialog box to gather more information.
Screen shot of Print command button, no ellipses
By contrast, in this example the Print command prints a single copy of a document to the default printer without any further user interaction.

3. Proper use of ellipses is important to indicate that users can make further choices before performing the action, or even cancel the action entirely.

This doesn't mean you should use an ellipsis whenever an action displays another window—only when additional information is required to perform the action. Consequently, any command button whose implicit verb is to "show another window" doesn't take an ellipsis, such as with the commands About, Advanced, Help (or any other command linking to a Help topic), Options, Properties, or Settings.

4. Generally, ellipses are used in user interfaces to indicate incompleteness. Commands that show other windows aren't incomplete—they must display another window and additional information isn't needed to perform their action. 

    Some actions in Eclipse:
    Restart -> it will just restart without asking. It might ask if any unsaved changes, for confirmation ellipses not required.
    Exit -> It will just exit from the eclipse. No ellipse required

    Import...  -user has to select what has to imported. We should use ellipse here
    Export...  -user has to select what has to exported. We should use ellipse here