On Sat, 25 Sep 2004 14:38:49 -0400, MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> wrote:
Talking with a friend today, we came up with the idea of renaming the "Edit group" feature to "temporary ungroup", since that is closer to what it does (from the visual user's perspective). "Edit parent" would then become "regroup".
I don't like it because:
- It suggests that this is the same as ungroup, only temporary. In fact it's not, as the <g> is not going anywhere. For example two objects selected within a group and outside it will still not group together with a "You cannot group objects from different groups or layers" message. Also when you permanently ungroup, you don't add new objects to the group; when you ungroup "temporarily" you're doing just that.
- This operation is obviously connected to layers: the group id is displayed in the layer selector, etc. This must be somehow reflected in the name of the command. I think "Edit group as layer" is short and precise enough.
By the way, do your newly added commands for moving layers up/down in z-order work correctly with such group-layers? I think they should move the group you're in relative to the adjacent objects even if these objects are not layers. Do you agree? This would work the same as the regular z-order change commands on objects, but apply to the (temporary or permanent) layer. In fact, you can use those commands for it with a few modifications. Note that they move 1 step up/down relative to the objects that the selected object (or, in your case, layer/group) overlaps; I think this also makes sense to preserve for moving group-layers.
One other group of verbs we need is for moving a currently selected object to the next/prev/top/bottom layers. If several objects in different layers are selected, they're first sorted together in z-order in the layer of the topmost (for moving up) or bottommost (for moving down) layer, then the entire stack of selected objects is moved to the top of the next/prev/top/bottom layer. It should display something like "<b>10</b> objects moved up to layer <b>Layer1</b>" in the statusbar.
By the way your current "Move to next/prev layer" commands must be renamed. They don't _move_ anything, they _switch_ the current layer. A helpful statusbar message would be "New current layer: <b>Layer1</b> (at <b>2</b> of <b>5</b>)".
And the commands moving the layer in z-order should display, "<b>Layer1</b> is at <b>2</b> of <b>5</b> (moved up)" or "<b>Layer1</b> is at <b>1</b> of <b>5</b> (<b>not moved</b>, cannot move any further down)".
One more thing: when you update any shortcuts, please edit doc/keys.xml to reflect this (I could do this myself, but it would be useful to have at least one more developer familiar with that file :) Use <note>s to describe any non-obvious aspects of the commands.
He also noted that Flash lets you do something comparable by double-clicking on a group. That seems like maybe a good idea here too.
We don't process double click in select-context at the moment, but this can be added I think.