Transmission: don’t “fix” what ain’t broken!

I love fast, simple, lightweight applications, so when I discovered Transmission it seemed like a godsend. Transmission is a bittorrent client that’s just that: small, simple, fast, easy. The GUI is plain but does the job, and there aren’t that much preferences except those that are needed for downloading files.

But lately they changed the layout of their file-selection dialogue, and in my opinion, screwed it completely. First, let’s take a look at the old layout, pre 1.30:

The old, good way of selecting files

The first checkbox controls all the other ones, so when you unselect that, the others get unselected too. I liked that..sometimes I just need a couple of files from a huge torrent. For example, if I needed 6 files out of a hundred, they were just 7 clicks away.

Obviously, this worked too well, so they changed it:

The new, crappy way

I can live with the extra buttons that determine the download priority (High/Normal/Low). But why replace the checkboxes by “Yes” or “No”? Clicking those doesn’t do anything. You have to select the file, and then click the Download or Ignore buttons. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if you only had to do it once, meaning if you could select multiple files, but you can’t(*)! You have to select each and every file you want to download or ignore, and then click the right button. That means I need 13 clicks now for the same 6 files, moving the mouse left and right all the time. It doesn’t seem that important, until you start doing it. It’s incredibly irritating, especially since it worked very well before. I can see no reason at all for the new layout. In fact, I couldn’t even find it in the changelog.

I have two options now: don’t upgrade to anything newer than Transmission 1.21, or use another bittorrent client. Neither is completely satisfying.

San

(*) Edit: Using Linux Mint, I’ve downloaded 1.33 from GetDeb.net, and discovered that you can in fact select multiple files. It surprised me, since I tried many times to do the same thing in Arch. Either I made a mistake (which is always possible), or something changed without changing the version number (which, I must admit, isn’t very likely). It’s an improvement, but still worse than the checkboxes