Hi all,
I've been busy with work since the release of 0.45, but now I have finally found some time to spend on Inkscape again... :)
I have uploaded a patch to the tracker which is a first attempt to implement dockable dialogs/panels using gdl (Gnome development library). http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1688508&gro...
The patch adds a dockable pane to the desktop on which any GTKmm:ified dialog can be docked. Here are some screenshots showing what it's all about: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Image:Dock_patch_1.png http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Image:Inkscape_dock2.png
To compile you'll need gdl >= 0.6.1, the latest version is available here: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdl/0.7/gdl-0.7.2.tar.bz2
Gdl is a fairly small UI library developed for IDE:s such as Anjuta. The main thing it provides is a set of components to build dockable interfaces.
I realize that it would be better to do this without an additional library, but right now I think gdl is the best option assuming that we want a dockable interface.
The pros of using gdl, as I see it, are:
* It provides a lot for free. Dockable items (dialogs in this case) can be attached and detached to docks, iconified to dock bars and docked to each other as separate floating groups. Furthermore they can be stacked as notebook tabs, and complete layouts can be saved/restored from disk (I haven't got that one working, though). It would require a major amount of work to reproduce the docking functionality found in gdl.
* It's still actively developed. Inkscape could benefit from the new functionality added to gdl.
...and the cons:
* It's yet another library, with all the problems that brings. The availability could be an issue. Distributions that provide Anjuta or Screem should have gdl in their repos as well. Merging gdl into Inkscape's tree is probably a bad idea...
* I haven't tried it on win32 or Mac OS X, so I'm not sure about the compatibility. It used to require some gnome only libraries, but it doesn't anymore from what I know.
* It's a C library. There is a C++ wrapper called gdlmm, but it hasn't been worked on since 2005, and I'm not sure how complete/stable it is.
The only alternative to gdl that I know of is CurlyAnkles. It has the same issues with availability and compatibility as gdl, but is less mature (I'm not aware of any project that uses it yet). On the positive side it provides other widgets that could improve Inkscape's interface.
As for the design I've chosen to keep the current UI::Dialog::Dialog hierarchy as opposed to extending UI::Widget::Panel, which I guess was planned to be the root class of everything dockable (?). The main reasons for this were that I wanted to keep the old dialog behavior as an option and also that I wanted to avoid rewriting the code of the current dialogs.
The way I did this was to break out much of the functionality of Dialog::Dialog into the implementations of an interface Dialog::Behavior. The implementations that extends it are FloatingBehavior (the current dialog behavior) and DockBehavior. Each dialog is instantiated with a behavior and the DialogManager handles them the same way as before, regardless of behavior.
The Dialog::Behavior interface covers most of the functionality of Gtk::Dialog. FloatingBehavior is just a proxy for a real Gtk::Dialog (just as before), while DockBehavior tries to emulate the dialog functionality on a GdlDockItem. This allows all the current dialogs (under UI::Dialog) to be dockable without rewriting them.
A global preference "options.dialogtype" controls what the kind of dialogs to create (0 = old/floating, 1 = new/dock).
It's still a work in progress, and I'd be glad to get feedback on the design, etc. (The class naming could probably be more accurate/consistent, for instance.)
There's a bunch of known bugs, but I'm not experiencing any major ones right now. I've probably broken something that used to work with the floating dialogs, though.
Please note that this patch only works for the GKmm:ified dialogs under UI::Dialog, so dialogs such as Fill&Stroke and the XML editor won't be dockable.
If there's an interest in working on this, I could create a branch, otherwise I'll just drop patches as I proceed. (I intend to continue to keep it up to date even if there's no plan to merge it -- Inkscape is pretty much unusable without it for me when using my primary window manager :)
I'll be on the IRC channel in a near future if anybody would like to discuss this further...
-- Gustav