[RFC] KDev4 Ui

[Andreas Pakulat]

Hi,

as a summary and some ideas I had while I couldn't sleep the last
hours about the KDev4 UI.

So we now have dockwidgets and ideal, I guess most/all of us agree that
one of the two needs to go. Which one depends on the possibility of
implementing most/all of the following items.

- drag'n'drop of the individual toolviews for organization

- possibility to have multiple toolviews open on each border, i.e.
------------
| Project  |
|          |
------------
| Teamwork |
|          |
------------

- allow to choose which toolview should get the corner of the mainwindow
  (side vs. bottom ones), optionally doing that on-the-fly with
  drag'n'drop

- focus switching and maximizing with both keyboard and mouse, the first
  should be obvious (what we already have in kdev3), the second is
  something I quite often use in Eclipse, doubleclicking the title of a
  toolview or editor-tab to close everything else. I'm not sure how to
  provide mouse-maximizing when we don't have tabs, but see below

- remove that stupid combobox :) Well we all know its just temporary,
  but so far it seems there are 2 types of people, those that want tabs
  and those that want scalability. I think we all agree that tabs don't
  scale for more than a handful of files, you'll either get annoying
  arrow-buttons or like in eclipse you'll just get a "..." tab that
  opens up a document-list. 

  I guess we need to have both again, I can't see a way to satisfy both
  needs and IMHO we don't really need to. We have the possibility to
  switch between the two modes in KDev3, I see no reason to make it
  different in KDev4, except maybe not using a KTabWidget and just
  hiding its tabbar.

- UI for edit-history, this goes somewhat together with the above, the
  people that have 20+ files open need either quick-open or edit-history
  (or similar) to switch between files. Now kdev3 edit history has a
  real bad drawback: You can't see where you're jumping to. If you know
  you've edited file foo.cpp before doing edits in the current file,
  you'll start jumping backwards, but you need to know the code or check
  the titlebar to see when you found foo.cpp (if you edited multiple
  locations in your current file). 
  
  My idea to solve this dilemma is attached, a small list of 11 items
  that shows the current file and the last/next 5 entries in the
  history. (history is a ringbuffer right?)

  That should provide enough information to let you reasonably fast
  switch back through edit history and we can even help resolving
  multiple files with the same name problem by adding a url or project
  in a second line. Of course the widget needs to be usable with mouse
  and keyboard at the same time. I know adymo had a similar widget for
  showing the list of open files hacked up already...

Did I miss any general-ui-concerns?

I'll be putting these things into the wiki, once the discussion has
settled.
  
Andreas

-- 
Communicate!  It can't make things any worse.