On 9/5/07, Gustav Broberg <broberg@...370...> wrote:
That's true, but you can also choose to dock any dialog this way, on "top" of another, by dragging and dropping it at the middle of the other one. GDL allows this arrangement to be displayed as notebook with buttons or tabs (http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Image:Inkscape_dock2.png).
To me, the main problem with it is that I cannot "expand" such a tab. If two dialogs are "tabbed" I can only alternate between them, but I cannot see both. That would be slightly more acceptable if they were indeed tabs as on your screenshot, but for me they are vertically stacked buttons which makes their behavior extremely counterintuitive.
That said, it would be easy for me prevent dialogs from being arranged in this mode all together (it's a just one line code change), but personally I'd like to at least keep it as an option. How about preventing them from being automatically arranged as groups when the dock is full, but still allow them to be arranged manually?
I think that might work. Unasked-for tabification is unpredictable and extremely annoying. If the accidental tabification by dragging a dialog on top of one another proves to also be a problem, we can indeed add a preference setting for that, off by default.
You still have the icon, and icon with text is better than just icon so long as it does not take too much space - and these take minimum space thanks to their verticality. So I see no problem with these "vertical icons".
What's the policy on adding "hidden" preferences for things like this? (I noticed that we already have a hidden "icononly" option for the toolbox.)
I don't think there's much of a policy on this, except that you must document it (as everything else!) in release notes in detail.
More problems: besides F8, it seems to also steal F6. Please give those keys back! :)
Can you make the title bars of dialogs in the dock use darker background, or at least bold text? Without it the title bars get lost visually.
I also propose to reconsider the position of the dock. Now it's on the right of the canvas but below the toolbars. I think it would make sense to expand it upwards so it would be on the right of all the toolbars and the menu bar, shortening them. The right end of the menu bar is always wasted anyway; as for the toolbars, all of them are now squeezable without any loss of functionality (a drop-down replaces those items that didn't fit). Similarly, I think the dock should be on the right of the palette at bottom - but still on top of the statusbar as now, because it's difficult to read statusbar messages when statusbar becomes too short. All this should give the dock a lot more vertical space which is valuable.