On Mon, 26 Mar 2007 14:07:49 -0400 "bulia byak" <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
On 3/26/07, Gustav Broberg <broberg@...370...> wrote:
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
This is an extremely desirable change. It turns Inkscape from a clunky and messy Gimp lookalike into a clean, modern-looking application. I'm all for it.
However, I foresee one problem. Currently all of our dialogs are built around the "one dialog serves all open windows" concept. Making them dock to the editing window seems to switch them to the "each window has its own dialog" paradigm. This therefore may not be as straightforward, because in each dialog we will also need to find and fix code which (1) assumes there's always only one copy of the dialog and (2) switches its state and display when a new window gets focus, and (3) applies the changes in dialog to the currently active window.
Gustav, have you looked into these problems at all? I suspect the severity of the required changes varies from dialog to dialog, but at least for Fill&Stroke it's going to be rather major (although it hasn't even been ported to GTKmm and Dialog class yet, as are many other dialogs).
No, I haven't, so you're right that it's still a problem to solve.
Skipping support for the current floating style dialogs would make this easier to solve but then gdl would be a requirement. There would still be the problem with gdl's floating dialogs, as Bryce mentioned, though. However, I'm not sure that I think it's necessary to keep the singleton behavior for them...
I like the single desktop approach with multiple (tabbed) documents that you suggest. With gdl it wouldn't be a problem to allow documents to be arranged side by side in a split view, or as tabs in a notebook.
On the other hand I guess that some people just like their windows to be managed by their window manager :)
-- Gustav