Beating a dead horse on the Font issue; The "Menu Bar" is, um, dead. No new products this decade are being shipped with menu bars, and certainly not File or View. That may be part of the confusion.
But the MAJOR part of the confusion is there's no Checkbox to apply the same Font to ALL windows (requiring 5 steps of repetition)... while Position has no Dialog or Checkboxes, but just a huge menu list of confusing selections like "Clear" and "Reset" and "Set Default" and "Clear Default" and "Clear All" and "Reset All" and "Save All" and "Reset Default" and "Save Clear All Default Reset Save" and and...
I'm a proponent of feature rich. It's mIRC's main selling point over HexChat and other clients as I stated above. But the way these features are [dis]organized, scattered hither dither in 7 different forms of presentation is pretty ridiculous.
Also the mIRC.ini has got to die. I like .ini, but it's extremely limiting and cannot support or unify the features we currently have or want -- like Network specific profiles, or Channel specific settings with defaults to fallback on. It was 10 years ago that people suggested we switch to .xml and we're still using .ini. I think this is one thing really holding mIRC back.
If we're going to slash and burn mIRC's settings UI(s), we should then consider a Mozilla-like approach as "about:config", or Microsoft's Regedit, for advanced user settings.
Overall there should be consistency. Consistency if nothing else. I pointed out in a previous post that even the Address Book is haywire with "Nick/Address" or "Just a Nickname" or "Comma Separated List of Nicknames". Why?! When each of these features could technically support a comma separated list of Nick/Addresses.
Anyway. Thanks for engaging me in this discussion.
I do hope the next version comes with a Wizard that can connect a new user to IRC in under 10 seconds, and even get them to where they want to be.
~ Raccoon [EFNet/#IRCHelp]
(P.S. I am completely sympathetic to how mIRC has evolved over the past 18 years to what it is today, and how things like File and View menus are not only heritage, but may have even been required for accessibility features for the blind, and such. mIRC's interface is a love/loath relationship for me, and I hope to miss navigating it.)
