ADR 0043: Faster global easing; welcome overlay two-column layout¶

Status¶

Accepted

Context¶

Two pieces of direct UI-polish feedback:

Caret movement on Enter/Delete and general navigation felt slow — not the blink (already fine), the glide to a new position.
The welcome overlay's shortcut list (docs/adr/0042), a single flat centered line per shortcut, read as visually disorganized.

Decision¶

`kEaseFactor`: 0.5 → 0.68¶

kEaseFactor was already the single constant every eased value in editor_viewport.cpp multiplies its remaining distance by each frame — caret glide, scroll, diagnostic focus reveal (docs/adr/0041), and the welcome overlay's own fade (docs/adr/0042). Raising it speeds up all of them together, by construction, with a one-line change — the "make it global" request was already satisfied by the existing architecture; this just raises the value. Remaining-distance-per-tick drops from 0.5^n to 0.32^n, roughly halving the number of frames to visually settle. Third bump on this constant (0.35 → 0.5, docs/adr/0027 → 0.68 here) — motion feel is inherently something to judge live, not from a screenshot, so this is reported for the user to confirm during actual use rather than claimed as independently verified.

Welcome overlay: two-column, dot-led layout¶

Replaced the flat "Ctrl+O — Open a file" centered string per line with a {description, key} pair rendered as: a small bullet dot, then the description left-aligned, then the key right-aligned — column widths measured from the actual content (QFontMetrics::horizontalAdvance, not guessed), so it stays aligned regardless of font/size. The whole block is still centered under the logo; only the internal alignment of each row changed. Verified live via screenshot — the four rows now read as a clean, legend-style list rather than four independently centered strings.

Consequences¶

No new state, no new timer — both changes are edits to existing code paths (a constant, and one drawing function's layout math). All 9/9 tests still pass (unrelated to this GUI-only change, re-run as a sanity check regardless).