Re: [Usability]Looking for UI ideas for a gnome IDE

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Sat, 2002-08-31 at 23:23, Duncan Coutts wrote: 

There: 
> http://www.coutts.uklinux.net/duncan/hIDE/hide-gui2.glade
> http://www.coutts.uklinux.net/duncan/hIDE/screenshot.png
you write: 
> "The one thing with this scheme that is not currently clear 
> is the distinction between pages that are open and those 
> that are not."

This was also my biggest problem when thinking about this layout... A
special branch for open windows is the most logical solution, but on the
other side does this have similar problems like tabs. Whenever you have
a lot of pages open this becomes less usefull and to clean up you have
to close the windows manually. So maybe a better idea would be not to
keep windows open at all. Of course unsaved documents would have to be
kept open and in memory, those could be drawn in red and maybe with a
star (*). Otherwise documents could simply be loaded on the fly (should
be fast enough). The most critical problem about this would be to store
cursor positions, selections, bookmarks, etc for every window that was
opened during the current session, so if you open it again all this is
restored. I guess this would be possible though, wouldn't it? 
The last remaining issue would be, if you have a lot of files in your
project, selecting them in the sidebar could get unconvenient and slow.
My suggestion to solve this would be two sidebar tabs: "Project" and
"Session". The project tab would contain all files of the project and
the session tab would show the last opened files sorted by usage, the
currently open window would always be the first, the last opened window
would be the second, etc. This way you could most of the time work with
the session tab, constantly switching between only a few files and
whenever you need to open a file that wasn't in use shortly, you can use
the more convenient project overview. 
One remaining problem I see with this is that the files in the session
tab would constantly switch their order so it becomes hard to simply
remember their position (like you can do with tabs). I'm not sure how
significant this drawback would be compared to the advantages. 

Instead of two tabs, it might also be worth a consideration to put the
"session" files into a dropdown box that is constantly visible. This
would probably be slightly less efficient but more consistent and you
would never have to switch sidebar tabs. Don't know... Good luck. =)

- Daniel