TRY: hide inline formatting buttons when there is no selection

[androb]

To simplify the Gutenberg experience we could try hiding inline formatting buttons of bold, italic, strikethrough and link until there is a selection.

Quick mock-up:

This is a suggestion to try in a branch. It would probably need some basic user testing to see the gain of a simpler UX is worth the harder feature discovery.

[karmatosed]

I will admit, I have concerns about this jarring the users. Do you have evidence this would be better for users? Having things pop up can be magical, but I'm not sure how magical or scary this would be.

I agree with stripping back and @jasmussen is doing some work there, I just think we need to be careful 'how far' we go.

[jasmussen]

Thank you for the mockup! Love that we're all rallying around simplifying the silhuette.

However I have to agree with Tammie, if we do this, we might as well go all-in and go with a popup toolbar to hold it all, and drastically reduce the silhuette. While that is also an option, the problems with both this mockup, and the popup toolbar are the same — they are arguably less discoverable, you can't press bold with a mouse and then start typing, and the toolbar itself covers content above it. Admittedly that last part is also a problem with the current implementation of docking the toolbar to the block.

I think the next thing to try could possibly be #2148.

[mtias]

We have made some changes so that toolbars don't show until you do text selection or disengage writing mode which I think solve the main issues.