Too may ways to select files

[Vladimir Prus]

On Wednesday 07 September 2005 02:38, Jens Dagerbo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This topic comes up with some frequency. While I agree that having all
> active, they are all optional plugins, to be enabled/disabled at the users
> leisure.

Sure, but by default, users see them all, and there's no clear explanation 
(like the one you give below), what's the use of each one. Result can be only 
confusion.

> New File - this abomination just has to go. The functionality is better
> accessed through the menu, and the whole plugin just screams out for a
> rewrite (have a look at the code..) KDevelop-4 scope. FileCreate (this),
> Project templates, code snippets, Abbrev... all share concepts but not
> code. All implemented differently.

Ok.

> File Tree - this is meant to display the project contents and has
> overlapping responsibilities with the project manager display. In fact, for
> some project types, this IS the "project management" display. I imagine
> with a new (KDev4) look at project management, this could be made
> superfluous.
>
> File Selector - this is a network transperant file browser. Powerful,
> generic but with very little direct integration into KDevelop (it's a very
> shallow port of a Kate widget), but if you want to open a pdf document off
> of a ftp server, this is the tool to use (if you want to do it inside
> KDevelop).

Why "File -> Open" is not a reasonable choice for that case? Is there are 
reason two have two different dialogs for openining files -- one shown for 
"File -> Open" and another shown in "File selector". Say, the latter does not 
allow to specify encoding of input files.

> File Groups - I always found it awful, but the basic idea is sound -
> grouping of files in an arbitrary and/or rulebased fashion. Needs a
> rewrite. Been in my todo since ages.

What about adding a "filter" button to the "File Tree" view that will allow 
you to select between previously defined file groups or define a new one?
So, we'll add one button and kill whole new window.

> File List - this does overlap with the Window menu, that's true. But the
> thing to remove is IMHO the window menu. It has much fewer features and
> scales worse. The need for this list should be obvious when you have more
> than half a dozen documents open - a tabbar becomes very annoying to use (I
> run without the tabbar in fact)

Yes, tabbar becomes very annoying. But maybe we can add the functionality of
listing open files to the "File tree" or project manager?

> Again, Project - Project options -> plugins. You'll find all of them
> optional. A year ago I implemented a way to let the user decide which of
> these should be loaded at project creation.. but the whole thing sorta
> morphed into Alexanders plugin profiles idea and this feature was
> essentially lost.

So, the initial set of plugins is always the one that comes from project 
template?

- Volodya