Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?

Another sighting of slightly annoying UI behavior. This time, it’s VirtualBox. I was trying out the Sun Storage 7000 series simulator (an awesome piece of work. Go download and play with it even if you don’t care a dime about storage, it’s engineering at it’s best), and after screwing up the simulator to my heart’s content, I wanted to delete it. Off I went to the media manager to delete about 16 disks that belonged to the virtual machine and that’s when my head started aching. The task was to delete 16 disks. The list box allows you to just select one at a time. So, 16 delete actions instead of 1 :(. Once you select the disk to be deleted, the delete isn’t triggered when you hit the delete key on your keyboard. You have to take the mouse all the way to the toolbar and click ‘Remove’. Doing it once was OK but doing it 16 times is damn tedious.

Also, every time I hit the delete button, I get the message shown below.

The message is there for a purpose. The operation of removing the disk cannot be undone. So it serves as a place to double check. But imagine doing this 16 times :(. Also, as a power user of VirtualBox, I know what I am doing. Can there not be a way to turn this message off?

The scenario I mention about is pretty uncommon. Most VirtualBox users would have a disk or two to be deleted at a time, and that won’t be as painful. Also, I haven’t quite figured out why the disks can’t be removed by the step that deletes the virtual machine. Why delete the hard disks separately? At least, why not ask the user if he wants to delete the hard disks associated with the virtual machine to be deleted.

[Update: Raised a bug (http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4828)  for this as per a suggestion in the comments.]