[RFC] KDev4 Ui

[Jens Dagerbo]

On Wednesday 14 November 2007 18.50.50 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> On 14.11.07 16:00:52, Jens Dagerbo wrote:
> > Why isn't the current Document List (or whatever it's called) enough?
>
> Well, if it automatically re-arranges itself according to my navigation,
> it might work well enough. That means when I go from foo to bar, it
> should be 1 keyboard-shortcut to go back to bar and the document list
> should show that. Same thing for mouse-movement, 1 move + 1 click at
> most to go back 1 edit position.

I'm not convinced code navigation history (places visited via language support 
features) and file navigation history (files visited via file switching or 
opening) mixes well.

MSVC6 had what I refer to as file navigation history - the files you had 
visited were sorted in a "stack-like" order and accessible through a 
file-switching keyboard shortcut. No support for navigation point or edit 
point history (and no visible indication of what the visit order looked 
like).

KDevelop3 mainly had code navigation history (by 3.4.1 I think we tracked all 
ways to switch files too, but a file switch was handled as a code navigation 
point), accessible through toolbar (dropdown-)buttons and keyboard shortcuts.

Eclipse/JDT (dunno about CDT) has both. But it keeps them seperately. You can 
either chose to go back/forward between code navigation points or use a 
keyboard shortcut to revisit files in a stack-like fashion (There was a nice 
patch to KDevelop3 that did this, but, instructively, it was implemented with 
a parallel history)

> > It actually scales and can additionally house many more actions than a
> > dropdown list. (VCS actions, file actions, etc)
>
> Sorry, I think you lost me here, what do VCS actions do in a document
> list. And what exact VCS actions do you mean?

Well.. the document list is a list of files, and simple VCS actions 
(checkin/checkout/diff/annotate, etc..)  are file-centric actions. Being able 
to click on a file and diff it with the VCS copy seems a reasonable feature 
to have, right? (Unless I'm totally lost, KDev3 hooked VCS actions into 
the "FileContext" and VCS actions were thus available in, among other places, 
the FileList (the "document list" of KDev3)

// jens