KDevelop UI states

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 23.07.09 17:01:59, David Nolden wrote:
> Am Donnerstag 23 Juli 2009 16:35:13 schrieb Alexander Dymo:
> > Recent question about buildsets/workingsets made me think about UI states
> > in which a user may work within KDevelop.
> >
> > In KDevelop4 UI state is defined by:
> > - session (loaded plugins)
> > - area (loaded toolviews)
> > - opened projects
> > - working sets
> > - buildsets
> >
> > To work, the user should be easily able to tell at any moment:
> > a) how current state of KDevelop represents the thing he's working on
> > b) what he needs to do when he wants to switch between things he's working
> > on, and how the state will change
> >
> > In KDevelop3 the state was merely described by a project.
> > a) current state is just a name of a opened project
> > b) to work on another thing, you'd just open another project and the UI
> > state (plugins, toolviews, opened files, etc.) would reflect this change
> >
> > In KDevelop4 we allow to change independently 5 parameters of the state.
> > Thus, the user can find himself in nearly an infinite amount of states.
> > This is too complicated. Even for me it's not clear atm how do I change
> > between things to work. And I think we need to change this.
> >
> > Ideally, I'd like KDevelop4 retain its flexibility, but offer an easy way
> > to change between states just like 3.x did. I mean one thing to change all
> > those 5 parameters at once.
> Isn't that what sessions were originally about? I admit I haven't actively 
> used sessions yet (or wouldn't use them if they changed those 5 states at 
> once), mainly because project-loading is still too heavy.

Actually we haven't really talked about what should be part of the
session and what shouldn't. Currently I think its just the list of
loaded plugins, loaded projects and I think also the launch configs.

So basically 2 sessions allow you to easily switch between two different
sets of projects. For example someone working part-time on kdevelop and
part-time on something totally unrelated - like a website. With sessions
he could easily switch between these two.

So yeah, sessions are an easy way of switching everything, if we store
workingsets and area setups in the active session. I've refrained from
just moving everything from the global config to the session when I
introduced them as I've seen the downside of that in kate. We really
need to think which settings should be part of the session and which are
better stored globally.

Andreas

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