How Do I Close Dialogs and Menus???

[acid andy]

I hope I don't sound idiotic asking this - I come from a desktop background. My new Pinephone has Manjaro CE (doesn't say if it's Phosh or what, but it's based on Gnome). When I open a dialog box, like for example on the Calculator application opening the menu on the top right and pressing About Calculator, what's the proper way to just close the dialog box?

The Calculator's not the only example, see About Chats on the Chats menu and other dialogs as well, not just the About boxes. They don't have a close button, so is there some magic touch gesture I'm supposed to know about to make them go away? Normally with this kind of thing you'd expect to just click elsewhere on the parent application window and it would close automatically but that doesn't work on the Pinephone.   So what's the deal with this, is it just a design flaw that the devs haven't had time to work on yet, a bug, or is there just some easy way to close the dialogs that I don't know?

I have a very similar problem on Firefox. If I long-press on a web page to open the menu, and then I decide I didn't want the menu, how do I make the menu go away? If I tap elsewhere on the browser window the menu still stays there, which I think is wrong. I end up having to choose something to click on like Select All, even though I don't want to, just to make it go away. The same problem occurs with Firefox's hamburger menu as well.

My current workaround for the dialog box problem, as mentioned in my other thread, is to tap the arrow at the bottom of the screen to bring up the window switcher and then use that to close the dialog. Unfortunately this isn't always possible. For example, I had to reboot the phone today after I put Firefox in fullscreen mode. When I did that, there were no buttons on the screen to switch tasks or active the on-screen keyboard (I tried the power button to lock and unlock the phone but I don't know if that would have helped as that time the endless lock screens bug got me!).

[deedend]

I got the same question... Often there's no "back" button in the UI. As far as I have understood, when you don't have a way to go back it's because it has opened a new window, so you simply push the multitasking arrow on the bottom, and close the current window (the one highlighted). It worked for me at least, but I didn't play too much with it because I was too busy trying other "distros". Not sure about the full screen Firefox issue though. I find this aspect of Phosh quite confusing...

[kern707]

I have also encountered this multiple times, and I got around it the same like @deedend  have described, when unable to properly close a dialog window (e.g a dialog window inside a main window of settings), I tap the bottom arrow which bring the display up to the "open windows" view, and from there I simply close the desired dialog window.

* This happens to me primarily with UI elements that are not correctly displayed (e.g. not scaling to the screen size, so probably the button for closing the dialog window is there, but off-screen so I am unable to see it or tap on it)

[MonCon]

There's a terminal command used in the thread linked below that scales a pop up dialogue box in evolution 'scale-to-fit evolution on' that may help, it seems to solve a similar problem, but I would back up your data before taking any even slightly technical advice from me.

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10711

[dukla2000]

I hope I don't sound idiotic asking this -
...

It is a PITA! I guess you are running Phosh - I too spend half my time clicking the arrow at the bottom so I can X some screen.

Some menus like the Firefox hamburger you can clear by clicking the hamburger again. But it plain has not been thought out.

Another option is you can click the "world" icon at the bottom left of the keyboard and select terminal. Then if you click the ">_" button at the bottom right you can get an escape. But still darn clunky.

[acid andy]

There's a terminal command used in the thread linked below that scales a pop up dialogue box in evolution 'scale-to-fit evolution on' that may help

That's extremely useful, thank you! It fixed the Lollipop preferences windows for me so I could actually see what was going on. Unfortunately I haven't yet found a way to scale-to-fit the dialogs used to open a file. Those always seem to overflow the screen so much as to be unusable at the moment.

Another option is you can click the "world" icon at the bottom left of the keyboard and select terminal. Then if you click the ">_" button at the bottom right you can get an escape. But still darn clunky.

Ah, and there was me wondering why they didn't bother to give us an Esc key! Thank you.

[dukla2000]

Dang, should have mentioned more if you are running phosh.

1) Occasionally I swap to/from landscape mode to try see bits of windows that are not immediately viewable.
2) gsettings set sm.puri.phoc scale-to-fit true
sets a default to fit all screens to size. Not particularly effective, e.g. for Firefox or Evolution I run about 5 minutes having to scroll and struggle and then suddenly it takes effect.

[hcal]

You can also often use the keyboard button to pop up the keyboard and hit escape or ctrl-w

[acid andy]

2) gsettings set sm.puri.phoc scale-to-fit true

That's helped a lot although it still doesn't seem to fix the dialog to open a file. Sometimes I can see enough to use those by flipping between portrait and landscape, like you said.