Add Help text to show what each setting does

[pjft]

In this particular case, it seems that adding the Filtering and the Surprise Me menu entries pushed the "Jump to Letter" to the third row, which means it requires a few more inputs for quickly navigating large lists. It certainly wasn't the intention -- in the Filtering case it was partly omission and partly "I don't really use the option that much myself" so I assumed that that was the same for the majority. Classic mistake #1 :)

It's a reasonable request to move it back to the first spot.

Actually, if we'd have anonymous analytics and usage metrics on EmulationStation, we could make a lot more informed decisions on design, development and maintenance -- but that's me thinking out loud about potential future developments for ES.

[TMNTturtlguy]

Just throwing out some random thoughts that are mostly on topic. I see benefits in just about every suggestion that has been made in this thread, but a lot of me agrees with @BuZz post above:

I'm not convinced about help tips - is it needed? I don't think es is that complicated.

What if instead of making all of these changes, and adding descriptions to the help bar we create a help dialogue box? Similar to what a lot of software applications now do. We assign a button that is not used in the menu right now like Y and call it "Help" or "Info" or anything else you guys think appropriate. By pressing Y it brings up a static list of options/commands and what they do. This is a list the user can just scroll down, but not interact with. It is basically an in game wiki that should match the layout of the menu. It is broken into sections, so for @Hex example above with the soda and noodles, we create a section for "Transitions" and we list each option from the menu followed by the description.

A few reasons for this thought process:

1. We can create this text document and as the menu options change, add, or delete we just edit the text information. When the update to the menu is pushed, the help text updates at the same time.
2. By implementing something like @Hex is showing might cause problems with some themes that don't use the current help bar, but have rather created dumb help bars so they could recolor/use different symbols. I think @ruckage may use this technique in some of this themes.
3. I am not sure it is intuitive to look down on the screen to the dimmed area for info when navigating the menu.

[Zigurana]

I feel that a help text in the bar below is a lot less intrusive than a pop-up.
How that needs to be handled by the themes is a secondary concern. Maybe make it a themable element, allowing the themer to hide it altogether?

[Hex]

For all those thinking that every option will have help it is not so. The help message will only be shown in Option List / Multiselect Lists atleast at present. Also Help text is optional ie. it is shown only if defined for an option. This allows help to be shown only for complex/ambiguous options like Audio Device selection (both, the one with PCM and the one with Alsa). Many users dont know what these options do and adding a small help text solves this problem.

@pjft Is Random Screensaver in help necessary?

@TMNTturtlguy Your suggestion is also acceptable.

What I was mostly going for was when a user doesnt know what an option does, they might be inclined to checkout all options in < > Type of setting (OptionList). Clicking A on that opens a list of text components. Here we can have some help shown. So help is not obstructing during the normal usage but only shown in deeper menus