Listbox selection behavior results in unexpected consequences

[Shawn Presser]

I decided to open an issue for the problem mentioned in #209:

When you click on a listbox item A, and then click on another item B, the UI tries to select every item from A to B inclusive, rather than switching the selection from A to B. It's a bit confusing to try to select a single item, and unexpected since shift isn't held down.

My Backup tab looks like this:

I tried to create a couple archives of disruption, and the result was this:

Notice that the size is 157MB instead of 171KB.

If you'd asked me "What does the archive disruption1 contain?" I would have told you "the contents of ~/disruption and nothing else". That was incorrect -- it contained both ~/bin and ~/disruption.

There are several ways to mitigate this:

• Ignore it (which is a valid engineering tradeoff)
• Ensure that the listbox has only two colors: selected and unselected. Currently it has three (Edit: four, actually). For each of these screenshots, consider the perspective of a new user trying to answer the question "Which items are selected?"

Screenshot A:

Screenshot B:

Screenshot C:

With no context, presented to a new user, I think users would say that in Screenshot A, the bin directory is selected. In Screenshot C, they might reason that the bin directory is selected and disruption is not, since if they were both selected, they would be the same color. And Screenshot B would have a clear answer -- "disruption is selected, but bin is not" -- except the UI at the bottom shows that the total size would be 154.28MB if they were to click "Backup" whereas the size of disruption is 171.71KB.

I think the fact that 154.28MB never changes is just a bug. Yup, confirmed: regardless of my listbox selection, Tarsnap always creates an archive containing both bin and disruption. I'll open a new issue for that.

To sum up, there seems to be two things to address: presentation (colors) and interaction (clicks). I think it would be clearer if there were only two colors (selected and unselected), and that clicking without holding shift will always result in a single item being selected, not a range of items.

[Shawn Presser]

I was confused. I see now that the listbox selection on the Backups tab is totally irrelevant. I thought the Backups tab was intended to be a list of all the folders you might care about, and then you can periodically create archives containing some subset of the list. Never mind!