Quickopen integrated on the main window. (Was: KDE/kdevplatform/plugins/quickopen)

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

On Thursday 19 March 2009 17:02:09 David Nolden wrote:
> Am Donnerstag 19 März 2009 16:27:42 schrieb Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen:
> >   More like QtCreator, really, but in the top-right corner. Specifically,
> > something that looks like a search/filter field rather than something
> > listing the current position in the document/code and such, sitting in
> > the position which is fast becoming the default position for such
> > program-wide searchy type things. If you want, i'll throw a quick li'l
> > mockup type thing together to show you what i mean :)
>
> I was already thinking about this. But apart from improved discoverability,
> I don't see the striking advantage in this approach,

  Primarily that mouse-navigation becomes much simpler, but yes, 
discoverability is a huge problem in kdev, and it's one of the things i hope i 
can help with a bit :)

> so to me, it isn't
> worth investing much work into this. If it was on the top side, it's
> probably easily possible to use the existing quickopen list to implement
> this, but one would need some additional mechanisms to let the user choose
> what he actually wants to search for, since there would be no room for the
> picking buttons.

  Click inside the search field, the contents of the current dialogue pops up, 
allowing you to click any controls on it (which you might find below the list, 
as per the mockup i should like to do if you want me to :) ).

> It would actually rather have some disadvantages, mainly that there would
> be less space available to show the matches. I know this kind of design is
> modern, but we shouldn't drive it too far. When something is better suited
> to be a dialog, it should be a dialog..

  Just because it is a search field does not mean the dropdown has to be tiny 
small - in fact quite the opposite. You can give far better control of how 
large the widget is, rather than handing it over to the window manager to 
handle it. When you initialise the widget, set it to a minimum size of the 
current smallest size possible on netbook (which would be 700 by 400 pixels 
roughly), and then let it expand so that the bottom left corner sits in the 
center of the window (so that people with larger resolutions get something out 
of their larger resolution)

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

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