Hello,
We have been looking in to making a few modifications to edit tools to
make it more useful, and spent some time discussing various solutions.
At the moment we have a specification for some basic additional
features [1] (waiting for auditing) but as it stands this does not
solve all of the problems - and a more involved solution will be
necessary to satisfy other requirements.
The first main solution to the problems outlined here would be to have
an option in preferences to completely enable or disable the edit
tools dialog. This shouldn't be difficult to implement, but lacks any
fine grained control over what is displayed - if some of the edittools
features are wanted, but not others. Control over the list of groups
displayed would require significant changes to the charinsert
extension, and is overkill in my opinion. A "memory" of the last
selected box would be possible using JavaScript cookies however,
avoiding the need to add any additional preferences.
To remove bloat from the page, as pointed out already, a lot of the
stuff could be moved to within JavaScript (for example, many of the
charinsert calls). I would shy away from any on the fly loading
though, such as AJAX, as this adds significant additional overhead
which is unnecessary.
It should also be noted that the edittools is usual ordered using
script (e.g. Latin, Arabic) rather than language - so using language
setting to control this would be unwise.
Regards,
Robert Leverington (MinuteElectron)