Small icons with functionality unclear of what they do, until you hover over them

[Nidvogr]

There's too much UI crammed into too little space in the red region of the image, the user cannot look at it, and quickly become aware of what most of the buttons do, since they have to hover over them to get an explanation.

I suggest the following

1. It would be beneficial to make an option to show text, permanently, and not just as a hover.
2. (Yellow part) move the Commit/discard and settings buttons to the left sidebar, and make more space in general for having making the small icons have a text directly in the UI, so they are more self-explanatory, without having to hover over them and remember what icon does what. Would also allow them to be a tiny bit larger. The Green part, could be expanded to the left a bit, and used for this functionality.

[DavidXanatos]

That is not a good solution,
onthe left there is also teh view mode with icons only so no space for a toolbar,
moving the red to the greeen is also problematic as this options dont have a meaning in the context of all the views which feature tha toolbar with the green section

[mystixa]

Yes agreed. I like the general idea of this but this observation is true of a lot of pieces in this program. There are nifty icons everywhere, but only sporadic explanations of what they do. Often those explanations are just as bad/good as an icon.

Stoplight.. ok not a bad icon, but that could apply to many things. Hover over it and you get 'resource protection'. ok.. thats again, so non-specific as to be meaningless. What resources? Files, network connections, how is it being protected? Is there a link to provide contextual help? No. Just gotta press buttons and guess.

'A firewall rule was blocked'. Ok it tells me what application, but not what it was attempting that was blocked, to what address, or what rule blocked it. Just it occured.

Overall this is a great program if you designed it but not so much if you're coming to it as a newbie.