Since you’re focused on improvements to the composer, here’s some feedback on the ‘hide preview’ view in particular. I have always found this view to be unusable because of the more than doubled line length.
I made a similar suggestion previously: Redesign editor to improve the writing experience [on Desktop]
I agree, that’s still too wide to really be very useful, especially because it’s wider than the post itself will ever be. I think we can explore this some more in the future.
The easiest approach would probably be shrinking the width of the popup (as you mentioned in your topic)… I’d want to make sure that it animates in a way that makes it clear what’s happening as someone transitions between preview/no-preview.
This is something I’ve been experimenting with a little bit locally
Some notes
Without the preview this was feeling a little odd when centered because the content is only slightly off from being aligned with the post stream, so I’ve offset it to align.
The offset makes sense for replying to a post, but not so much when composing a new post if you’re on the topic list or other pages, so maybe new posts without the preview should still be centered
The composer font size is also slightly smaller than the actual post font, so we’d ideally want to increase that so the text wraps on lines the same way.
what about a fade without moving the left position. I usually dont like UIs jumping everywhere. With good execution it could feel very natural. Also if we have space to show more of the main col content, why try to hide it by moving it to the center?
If you triggered the jump, it is fine… when UI moves “by itself” it becomes a problem.
I say ship what’s shown in the video. There can’t be that many people that hide the preview, anyway.
This is live now for anyone who wants to check it out — I didn’t end up aligning it with the post stream because it’s kind of weird if you’re browsing other pages and it’s off-center
If you’re open to a little more experimentation and feedback here, I’d be curious to see it in action for a bit aligned with the post stream.
If we did that, I think it’d also be nice to try having the show/hide preview button stay aligned to the right side of the input window, so it doesn’t move around. Then it can be toggled on and then off without moving my mouse around…
