KDE/kdevplatform/shell

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

Thursday 06 November 2008 David Nolden wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 6. November 2008 20:57:07 schrieb Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen:
> >   Having thought a little more deeply about this whole mental model of
> > "All files are open" over the last few days, it has dawned on me that
> > really, that's what we already have - the search-through-everything code
> > model in KDevelop4 indicates that it already keeps the entirety of the
> > project in memory (i know this isn't *really* the case and such, but...
> > you know). So, in short: I agree that it makes sense to not have a tab
> > bar, but more like a breadcrumbs trail a la Dolphin's one :)
>
> This just won't work unless we have a really good hint to show a limited
> set of files to the user that he's working on. I don't want to have to
> remember that. Tabs don't scale well, but at least they help with that. I
> would feel totally lost if I could only navigate using history while
> working on 8 different files in the same time.
>
> So we first need to develop a good replacement, something like the "working
> file sets" we once were talking about, before we can start thinking about
> removing the tabs. Seriously, a dropdown-list is not the answer! We had
> that once, and we all aggreed that it sucked..

  i couldn't agree more - drop-down for keeping overview isn't a viable 
solution. However, the suggestion about a working file sets system would be 
very interesting indeed, and a good immediate solution, but i'm just wondering 
if not it would be possible to use the semi-intelligent search and context 
browser to handle this... This, of course, would require people to really 
think about their code structure, so it wouldn't work entirely on its own, 
but... if we can make it possible to work as little with the project tree and 
file tree as possible - only work with it when creating new files (which might 
even be discouraged by automatically creating files for new classes and 
such)... yeah, i'm sort of brainstorming on the fly here, so let's sum up:

- Drop-down bad
- Working file sets good in the medium-term
- Make people work as little as possible with the on-disk file structure good
  in the long term

-- 
..Dan // Leinir..
http://leinir.dk/

                          Co-
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