[patch] minicli sizing

[Dawit A.]

On Monday 01 November 2004 09:09, Martin Koller wrote:
> On Monday 01 November 2004 13:56, Dawit A. wrote:
> > Nope. This has been hashed over a million times before. Please search
> > the mailing lists for those discussions.
>
> Hm ..., did not find anything.

You 've to search for minicli discussions. I do not remember the thread 
subjects now, but they are in there. You can also see the commit logs for how 
many times similar changes were made and then reverted back because of the 
problem I mentioned below...

> > With your change, the size of the
> > combobox will grow infinitely with the size of the URL which is worse.
>
> Can you tell me details, please? When will it grow (by doing what) ?
> I can't see why it should.

Simple. If you type or paste a very long URL then the next time you restart 
KDE, kdesktop actually, the minimum size of the minicli would be the size of 
the longest URL in the combobox. This is a far worse problem than a fixed 
size Run command box whose size is actually set based upon your actual screen 
size...

> > BTW,
> > why could you not edit a long URL with the current fixed size ?
>
> It's not the question of "if", it's the question of "how userfriendly" it
> was. Also, it seems to me that the "fixed size" approach is not done "by
> design", but instead to work around a different problem (which you
> described above). 

I do not know whatever gave you that impression, but it was done by design so 
that the combobox does not keep growing in size as you input larger and 
larger URLs. It was not my intention for the minicli to be used for entering 
large URLs even though it can handle it...

> I was trying to solve this in a clean way (probably I  failed, but then
> please give me a test case where it does not work and I'll  try to improve
> it). 

You can try, but it will not work. Like I said many have attempted before (see 
the commit logs) and it has always failed! As long as the dialog is resizable 
the combobox will force it to grow as longer URLs are added to it...

> P.S.: my use case:
> I have always the problem that I receive emails with long URLs from broken
> mailers which break the URL in several lines. So I copy/paste this into
> minicli and try to find the blanks and then remove them.
> On being able to resize minicli, I have a much better overview and don't
> have to scroll inside the combo.

I am sorry, but this is not the intended use of the minicli. It is not meant 
to be an editor at all, period. You can also side scroll long URLs in 
comboboxes using the right/left arrows once you have highlighted them. If you 
have to edit such long URLs, please use one of the many text editors 
available or simply do it in the your browser itself. Minicli was never 
intended for such use...

> Also, a non-resizeable dialog always reminds me on the borked MS
> implementations when one could not resize e.g. a fileselector dialog (where
> it also was possible to select a file, but not in a friendly way).

A file selector and a command box for quickly typing short commands (intended 
use of minicli) are not the same thing...

-- 
Regards,
Dawit A.
"Preach what you practice, practice what you preach"