archlinux
manual partitioning is unusable (and dangerous) with a larger font
Which ISO version are you using?
archlinux-2024.11.01-x86_64.iso
The installation log
N/A. This is a UI issue.
describe the problem
Manual partitioning is unusable (and dangerous) with a larger font
archinstall-3.0.1-1
This is on a 1080p display.
- Prior to running
archinstall, use a larger font such as:
setfont solar24x32
- In
archinstall, select "Disk configuration" -> "Partitioning" -> "Manual Partitioning" - The disk selection menu is offscreen, and only the current disk properties table is visible. Use the arrow keys up/down and press 'enter' on a drive:
- On the subsequent screen, only "Press ? for help" at the top is visible.
The user is in a bad state here. ? brings up the general "Archinstall help", which is useless here. ESC doesn't work, ctrl+c doesn't work, q doesn't work. You just have to know that you need to proceed further in to get the option to cancel (that's a usability issue even without the rendering problem TBH).
I can see how this is not a good behaviour for limited space. I'm open to any suggestions on how to improve this. Obviously we can enable ESC to abort the operation, but regarding the information cut off it'd be tricky to handle that.
ESC to abort the operation pretty much universally would be nice, as there are several places where that's not the case. It's pretty universal that that key will cancel something, so at least you can back out of the install script and use another partitioning tool. I'm not a pythonista, but if the menu code is able to know its own dimensions in characters, it could at least detect the case with something like:
import shutil
terminal_size = shutil.get_terminal_size()
width = terminal_size.columns
height = terimal_size.lines
If so, it could at least display an error if everything won't fit.
More ideal would be if it could jump down to display the selected menu item on arrows keys and attempt to right-justify the menu items before wrapping them, that would be better. The wrapping in the table isn't terrible, and someone using a large could reasonably expect some of that, but at minimum, it probably shouldn't allow submitting a menu selection that's outside of the viewable area.
Not entirely a solution for this problem.
But I noted a workaround if you're running qemu where the screen defaults to a smaller size here: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/3024#issuecomment-2606848337
While we're discussing on how to solve this for smaller resolutions.
I've experience this today when I had to set the mount point for the manually created (or the existing) partitions, even with the default console font. I guess it might be due to many texts in the partition table since I had existing partitions and I added a btrfs partition with sub-volumes. But, I'm not sure.
In my case, the workaround was setting a smaller font for the console font:
setfont ter-112n
For any issues with font or text display a screenshot of the problems would be much appreciated