[Fwd: RE: [Glade-devel] (idea) remove GladeWidget->children]

[pborelli katamail com (Paolo Borelli)]

I forgot to cc glade-devel...


-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>
To: Victor Porton <porton ex-code com>
Subject: RE: [Glade-devel] (idea) remove GladeWidget->children
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 13:55:18 +0200

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 12:17, Victor Porton wrote:
> I'm not an expert but I insist that my opinion is right. See below. Also
> this change (moving a widget from one window to an other and getting rid of
> one of the windows) is so simple that it seems that it would cause no
> trouble even for stupid users (your users are programmers).

I'm not saying that it's wrong nor that it would make things more
difficult to the user, but as I said before I'd prefer to keep the ui
the same as glade2 until everything it's working properly. At a later
stage we can make a complete review of the ui, possibly with the help of
usabilty experts and with a broader user base.

> > - if the project is big an expanded widget tree can be quite big and
> > have many levels of indentation, while the main window has a fixed small
> > size.
>
> This is exactly the reason why I suggested "Collapse all" button. It will
> allow quickly decrease tree widget size to almost as little as just list.
My problem with this is not the collapse all button, it's that the main
window is small and if you have the complete tree you may have to use
the scrollbar to locate a widget, which I find annoying.
On the other hand the widget tree window, if I recall correctly, is
automatically resized to fit the tree.

> Anyway when we access widgets, it is IMO just a mess to have two views.
> Personally I normally set both list and tree to the same window (if use
> both), so it is a unnecessary duplication.
I have not understood this, sorry.

> > - In my personal experience you don't use the widget tree that much,
> > while you often need to click on the toplevels to switch from a window
> > to another; as a matter of fact the widget tree is hidden on startup.
>
> My experience with Glade-2 is reverse: I use the tree very often to access
> such things as alignments and event boxes. I also often click to a widget
> inside e.g. an event box and then open the tree to go level up in widgets
> tree and choose the event box.
These are easily accessible from the right click menu.

> So I often open widgets tree. I also often close it because it clutters
> screen and WM windows list. Sadly my window manager (some day I should
> change it) doesn't allow to bring to the top all windows of an app to the
> top by single mouse click. So I need to do many clicks to bring to top all
> the multiduous windows of Glade, what is very inconvenient.
As a side note, if the window manager supports it (eg metacity), in
glade3 the palette, widget tree etc are marked with
GDK_WINDOW_TYPE_HINT_UTILITY, so you only have glade3 in the windows
list, which brings up all the tools.

> These are reasons why I insist on lesser number of windows.

As said before it's not that I'm saying you are 100% wrong, it's only
that I'm not convinced that it is obviously right :)


ciao
        paolo