Interface not really usable on small displays

[Zapeth]

I'm on a Pinephone which is features a 1440x720 display, using postmarketOS 24.06 (so essentially Alpine Linux 3.20) and Plasma Mobile 6.0.5, with a 200% screen scale.

Here are some screenshots how the interface currently looks in portrait mode with that configuration:

And here are screenshots in landscape mode:

I think the usage issue with the settings dialogue window could be worked around by making the content scrollable (if there is such a feature in qt). Parts of the main interface could also be scrollable (the top menu for example), the input/output window could be forced to the display width.

As for the input buttons, one interesting idea to fit a larger amount buttons on a small screen is to implement multiple "keyboards" and making them swipable in the horizontal and vertical directions, to switch between the different input methods (for example the "Math Studio Express" calculator app does this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZvFKN40tOo, not sure how feasible that would be to implement in qt though)

I realize that mobile devices are probably not part of the supported target systems right now, but I thought it might be useful to show how the interface currently looks/behaves like on small screens, maybe to collect some suggestions on how a possible interface could look/work on mobile or smaller displays.

Another approach could also be to write a completely new interface that is targeted only for mobile instead of trying to fit it all in one code base, but maybe qt is flexible enough to keep the necessary changes for implementing different view modes to a minimum.

Either way this is not a critical issue for me, I'm perfectly fine with using the qalc cli instead, for the forseeable future.

[hanna-kn]

The keypad is the primary problem. Hide the keypad (or only the number pad) and the minimal width will be sufficiently reduced. I realize however that this might not be desirable on a device without keyboard.

There are multiple keypads (including a customizable one) but this does not affect the left number pad part. A solution might be to provide the number pad as a separate keypad (if set as hidden).

I will look into the feasibility of making the preferences scrollable, as well as providing better defaults for small screens.

[Zapeth]

Thanks for the quick changes, hiding the keypad is a viable workaround for the time being, especially since the system on-screen keyboard appears anyway when focusing the text field.

However that on-screen keyboard also takes up a lot of additional space, so I think for mobile usage it would be better to be able to only use the in-app input buttons, with the system on-screen keyboard disabled (that might be rather platform-specific though, so not sure if its worth the effort to looking into implementing that).

Unfortunately it will take me a while to test the changes with the scrollable preferences dialogues since I currently can't compile the app myself (and depending on when a new version is released it takes a few months to land in Alpine stable).

Feel free to close this issue until then, I can reopen it if I encounter more noteworthy usage issues on the small display.