On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 02:37:39 -0400 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> Cc: Inkscape ML inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] document properties/metadata dialogs
On 1/29/06, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
Are these dialogs supposed to be *real* dialogs or palettes?
Good question.
I guess that depends on if developers believe these dialog need to be left open all the time. (And there are some features which probably should be moved into the menus, rather than trying to keep a dialog open all the time to keep toggling it. This could take quite a bit of menu reorganisation to get right though)
I would think in the case of the Metadata/Properties dialog should be a real dialog, but non-modal. I would hope metadata would not need to be changed very often, maybe once or twice per drawing but it is generally nicer if a dialog can be left open (almost) all the time for those using Inkscape for tagging many documents rather than for drawing one.
If dialogs, could they have "Close" button in the bottom please? In both cases (dialogs and palettes) closing them with [Escape] keyboard button would be helpful as well. Ideally, any dialog or palette should be closed on [Escape].
What do the competitors do?
IIRC Gnome uses Esc only on dialogs labelled Cancel (or was it Close, one or the other) but I believe some distributions have been patched so that Esc will close standard dialogs in all cases and personally I'd prefer it that way (and if enough distributions are doing it anyway Gnome may yet accept the change back upstream).
This was discussed long ago, and the consensus was that Esc should not close dialogs. Instead it should move focus to the canvas while leaving the dialog open. And this is what it currently does. This is because our dialogs are mostly of the "always on" kind, not "transient" kind.
I agree the palette dialogs are a special case.
I'd be interested to read more about what was discussed, when you say a long time ago do you mean I should check the Sodipodi mailing list archives?
As for Close button, after the GTKmm change adding it is a matter of adding a single parameter in the dialog constructor. I would not mind having it for document/inkscape prefs.
I'd like that too.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/