etherpad lite color picker

[Daniel Reeves]

We're working on migrating from Etherpad 1.0 to Etherpad Lite and the
color picker kind of drives me batty. It's tedious to pick the color
from a continuous space like that instead of just picking my usual
color (my colleagues and I are now used to each other's standard
colors) from a short list.

Have others found a way to deal with that? Even an option to enter a
hex color value would be nice.

Thanks for the amazing work on Etherpad Lite, btw!

Danny

PS: One other little pet peeve so far: when Etherpad Lite loses
connectivity it pops up a notification window that obscures the pad.
That's unfortunate when you bring up a pad with logistics for a trip,
say, and then disconnect. In Etherpad 1.0 you could still read and
scroll even after disconnecting from the internet -- very handy!

--
http://dreev.es  --  search://"Daniel Reeves"

[Fabian]

Should be easy to implement. If you have a look at the color picker
you'll see on the close function:

var newColor = "#" +parts.join(''); // "0070ff"
myUserInfo.colorId = newColor;
pad.notifyChangeColor(newColor);
paduserlist.renderMyUserInfo();

Just insert an input field and a submit button and call the functions
above after inserting an hex value.

You can use ./static/custom/pad.js for the modifications.

> --http://dreev.es --  search://"Daniel Reeves"

[Peter Martischka]

I think a option to enter a hex color is a bad idea. 99% of the users
have no idea what a hex color, even most programmers have no clue

[Peter Martischka]

I think the only long term solution for this color picker topic is to
ship multiple color pickers and let the admin choose in the settings.
In the early days uses wanted more colors (we once started with 8(!)),
than I made a simple patch to increase it to 32 and now we have a very
large color range. And suddenly, users want less colors to choose
(wtf!). Basicly, I'm sick of this color picker topic and I hate to
discuss this over and over again. So lets ship multiple color
choosers, chosse a default and everyone can bring his own color
picker. We will probably end up with 20 different color picker this
way, but I don't really care anymore. I think there is no one solution
that makes everyone happy

On 16 February 2012 11:30, Peter Martischka

[Daniel Reeves]

Fabian, thanks so much for the pointer on how to hack this in!

Peter, I know it's mainly an aesthetic disagreement but my philosophy
on color picking is that there should be a short list of colors all of
which have different names. You should be able to say to your
collaborators that "the purple edits are me", etc. So having multiple
shades of purple is no good.

Still, I do think it's possible to have the best of all worlds. I
agree that a hex color field is pretty ugly. I now think that there
should just be some colored squares to click on below (or above) the
color wheel that just serve as shortcuts to jump to particular points
on the color wheel.

Do you think that could make everyone happy, without needing to have
this as an admin-configurable thing?

(I've been using Etherpad 1.0 heavily since before it was open-sourced
and now feel super frustrated at the inability to easily choose one of
those original standard 8 colors! :( Thanks again to Fabian for
pointing the way to a workaround!)

--

[Fabian]

You're welcome.

If you have implemented this hex input you could share your code!

[Tim Colson]

On Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:53:24 AM UTC-7, Pita Poison wrote:

I think the only long term solution for this color picker topic is to
ship multiple color pickers and let the admin choose in the settings.

That seems like a reasonable approach. Could the picker be made on a per-pad basis? 

If I wanted to work this, what would be needed and where in the code does it live? Is it a plug-in? 

What if I wanted to change the picker based on how many people are using the pad (maybe start with 4, but when person #5 joins, it jumps to 8, and when Person #9 joins it jumps to 16). Do hooks for watching attendance exist? 

Cheers,

Tim