Re: [RFC/PATCH] VcView: Add support for not using tabs for diffs

[Kai <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 20 April 2011 14:17, Peter Tyser <ptyser gmail com> wrote:
> I was curious what others thought of this.  Its sort of like gedit's
> left-hand filelist pane.  I prefer this layout on my work PC (24"
> monitors) and widescreen laptops.  There are a couple of other
> similar options that could be added to make its functionality
> more like gedit.

I like it. I need to play with it a bit more, but I think it's a solid idea.

It also makes me wish (yet again) that we had the concept of top-level
comparisons, and defaulted to one top-level per window. In that case,
this just becomes an alternative to tabs for VC views, and there's no
confusion. As it stands, having tabs *and* this mode is... a bit ugly.
I notice that you've disabled tabs for this view. Doesn't that break
existing behaviours?

> I made the least changes I could to demonstrate
> the concept, but would be open to alternate implementations.

Looking at it, I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be easier (or at
least possible) to implement this as a notebook with hidden panes, and
have the listview on the left control which tab was active. There are
probably plenty of implications of this that I haven't thought
through.

> I don't like that this fragments the UI settings a little more,

Predictably, I'm also not wild about the UI setting, but I think the
benefits of the view probably outweigh the irritations of the
preference.

> but adding a side pane to the file and directory diffs seemed
> like a can of worms that I'm not prepared to open as I primarly
> only use the VcView functionality of meld.

I don't think a side pane makes any sense for file diffs (okay, it
might be cool to have a code outliner pane or something, but not
happening any time soon), and directory diffs are generally *much*
wider than VC views, so not as practical. In other words, I don't
think that the inconsistency is something that needs addressing.

Could you please open a bug and attach your patch?

cheers,
Kai