About User Interface Compactness

Vitamin-R is the kind of utility that needs to fit into your life and into your work. In order to be able to do this, it needs to support a whole range of different personal preferences and requirements.

Vitamin-R offers a whole range of different customization options, ranging from soft v. hard breaks, pomdoro style- breaks v simple breaks, keyboard v. mouse preferences, hide-able and optional panels, etc..

Tying all this together is a new setting: the user interface compactness setting that you can get to via Vitamin-R 4 ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Miscellaneous ⇒ Main Window Compactness.

Version 1 and Version 2 of Vitamin-R relied on a fairly compact user interface that was little more than a menu bar pop-up menu and offered little in the way of configurability. This was fine for people who prefer this minimalist style, but it also made it difficult to understand the tools many features and proved quite limiting.

Version 3 completely rewrote the interface from scratch and introduced a much more configurable single window interface, which made many things more obvious, but was not popular with those who prefer a more compact design.

Vitamin-R 4 is now able to provide a very compact interface for those who desire it, as well as offering more balanced, and even a beginner “everything is visible” interface.

The Main Window Compactness setting controls how the height of the main window is managed. Do not resize window automatically setting works just like version 3. The window is always high enough to accommodate all the controls, but you can manually resize the window to any size you want.

Most people will prefer the Resize window to keep it compact as long as the sidebar is closed option, which works like version 3 if the sidebar (e.g. the Help, Now, Later, Scratch or Log pads are open) is open, but when this is closed the window height is never higher than is required to display all the controls. This makes the most sense, because if your pads are open you need vertical space to use them properly, and when the pads are closed there’s no point wasting screen real estate.

For real fans of a compact interface, the Always resize window to keep it as compact as possible setting always keeps the window height as small as possible, even if it means the pads are hard to use.

In order to get the most compact interface possible, it is best to re-run the profile selection (Vitamin-R 4 ⇒ Choose Pre-defined Profile) and select Prefer a Very Compact Interface. This will switch all of the myriad state-specific options to their most space conserving options and give you the most compact interface possible. Feel free to re-activate options that you may miss (e.g. the Show Calendar Events, etc.)