@snow @freemo

The proper use of wide screen displays is one of my pet peeves. I have collected a few folders here of screenshots, and posted even at mastodon.social itself, with a couple of them, asking Eugen to consider a different, more writer and reader friendly AWI feature.

He did respond to it, and was surprised I was not interested in having multiple columns with live feeds on them - which would be too distracting for my personal use. I like the layout on the screenshot Snow linked to above -- and even went and made a fresh one to document the better AWI setting in the Dark Theme that Qoto and Todon.nl have.

These two were the only two instances were I was able to use AWI in a pleasant way. I am attaching here at comparative screenshot, taken just now, with Todon.nl in AWI mode, which is identical to the Qoto AWI dark screen theme as far as I know.

I kind of silenced my campaign for general usability improvement, since I have discovered that a lot of sys admins, and most crucially, the lead project developer, are all long time Twitter users and seem to think that is the way to go.

Which explains features I abhor :

- 500 characters maximum Toot size is hard coded into the Mastodon project files, and not in a configuration file as it should for ease of keeping modified settings from getting erased by an update or version upgrade.

- the assumption that AWI is the shits, and that emulating TweetDeck is the best way to use real screens in laptop or desktop computers.

If someone wants to have 3 or 4 columns, and live feeds in each of them, well, enjoy it. What I prefer is to have 2 columns, and a proper Toot editing area.

In reality, I have found that the "Collapsed Mastodon" add-on for Firefox is a giant improvement.

- Not only if allows me to set my preferred to active columns mode, but it does so while collapsing totally the leftmost column (the one is writing about, where the Toot Editor lives).

So, it's not 20, 30 or 40% of the screen -- it's zero, as the functions which use that area can be perfectly executed in the columns in use themselves. It will open a reply Toot editor (with the much larger and more comfortable width the columns already have) right below any message you intend to reply to.

A new Toot all together (not a reply to someone) will open an overlay near the "Pencil" icon and proceed to take user input for the new post.

Best of all -- for people who use Firefox and this add on, we can configure our preferred work arrangement without having to beg each system administrator in instances we use to please consider making improvements to their AWI css files.

Attached Screenshots :

#1 : Todon.NL, AWI mode, enhanced Dark Theme Full Width instance theme. (Without Collapsed Mastodon)

#2 : Qoto.or, AWI mode, enhanced Dark Theme Full Width, with "Collapsed Mastodon" enabled.

Not the HUGE reply box I am using on this reply -- the FULL width of the Rightmost column. No lack of space in this setup.