Re: [Gimp-gui] Force Toolbox Widgets To Bottom

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi,

On 2015-10-15 01:53, Andrew Pullins wrote:
> Feature Request [1], attachment 313345 [2]
>
> To make the Toolbox look better and more consistent with the rest of
> GIMP. I suggest that the "You can drop dockable dialogs here" be
> dropped and the Toolbox Widgets be forced to the bottom leaving room
> for dialogs to be docked at the bottom of the tool box.
>
> This label is not really needed as when users first start up GIMP
> there is already a dialog underneath the toolbox so right off the get
> go they know that you can place dialogs here. If the user decides to
> take this dialog and place it anywhere else, now there is this ugly
> label telling them what they already know they can do. This may even
> be insulting to users, as you are saying they need a big banner to
> tell them how to use your software.

I'm sorry but there are no "insults" in having a label giving 
information to user (what about status bar, tooltip bubbles, or help 
button and doc pages! They all give information on how to use the 
software, hence would be insulting? Seriously?). This is a non-rational 
rhetorical method which one can indeed see in some bug reports saying 
basically "if you don't do this change, then you are insulting users, 
therefore you are assholes; so you have no choices and do what I say". 
And I wish not to see this kind of things on this mailing list, please.

There are perfectly good reasons for removing such a label, and you give 
some of them in this email. Let's stick to them.

> This is also very inconsistent from the rest of the GIMP. One because
> of the label. and two because the entire box that contains this lable
> gets lit up when you bring a dialog back to the toolbox. This is a bit
> strange when every other place you can place a dialog there is a thin
> ~5px line that lites up that tells you that you can place it there.
>
> Now that this label is gone what is to be done with the Toolbox
> wegits? Well I think they should be forced to the bottom of bottom of
> the Toolbox.

Now this is a good and rational reason. And this is not because the 
label disappeared that the toolbox would grow, but the opposite: why not 
allow the toolbox to grow (which may or not have the consequence to have 
the label disappear)?
We allow resizing of each dock, and this is indeed perfectly sensible 
that some people may want to lose a dock and have a toolbox taking the 
whole vertical size instead.

Actually your 3 messages are a good start to rethink maybe some of our 
UI organization for dock, tools and menus. There have been ideas laying 
around for years about getting an horizontal button bar, and so on.
I think I'll open a wiki page to discuss this topic too.
Thanks.

Jehan