Re: meld future ui

[Andrew Beyer <beyer andrew gmail com>]

I'm not sure I have any answers here, but some thoughts:

If you do want to go with a "master" tab, one model might be to say
that a meld window can contain no more than one dir or vc diff, which
automatically becomes the master tab. I'm not sure how many people
actually use multiple vc or dir diffs at once (I seldom do), and if
you had to open a separate window to do so, you'd have the associated
file diffs grouped together by window.

> Hopefully nobody wants nested notebooks!

Actually, that seems to be closer to the concept of your use case. (at
least as I understand it) You essentially want to group file diffs
that you've opened by clicking in a dir/vc diff with that parent diff.
So any thing opened from the command line, menu, or toolbar becomes a
top level tab, while anything opened from within a top level tab
becomes a child of it.
While I wouldn't advocate nesting off-the-shelf gtk notebook widgets,
I have seen notebook like controls done in RIA style ajax/flash type
things, where its more common to roll your own widgets, which have
handled nested tabs fairly well. Rather than have complete nested
notebooks, they have some sort of nesting shown in a single tab bar at
the top. (I can try and find an example or draw a mockup if my
description isn't getting the idea across) I'm not necessarily
advocating this, but just wanted to point out that it is not as
unreasonable as it might sound at first.

Finally, I'll go way out on a limb and suggest something that came to
mind, but would entail a much more significant ui change. My
observation is that the whole side-by-side panes thing is less
necessary for a "tree" diff (ie a directory or vc view) than for a
"flat" file diff, since you aren't really looking at detailed changes.
I'd say that in 95+% of my use of tree diffs, I am doing a simple
two-way comparison and using it as a navigation tool to drill down
into new or changed files. The only states in this case are,
"Unchanged", "Changed", "Left only" and "Right only" and I think all
the necessary information could be presented in a single pane with
color/style or other indicators, without the side-by-side display.
So, given that; what if a single tree diff was displayed as a single
tree view in a sidebar next to the current notebook widget, similar to
the history or bookmark sidebars in firefox. This single tree diff
would be your "master" one and would not show up as a tab at all, so
you don't accidentally close it, and could stay on screen as a quick
navigation tool when you want it. This appeals to me both for the
navigability, as well as avoiding special case behavior where one tab
doesn't act like all the others. I'm curious what others think about
the idea.