Usability suggestions and questions

[Milian Wolff]

On Sonntag, 29. November 2015 18:29:41 CET René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Now that I'm finally inching closer to being able to build (and hopefully,
> use) Kdevelop5 on OS X I'm reviving an old ticket I created with a number
> of suggestions, on here as suggested by Kevin. The ticket is over a year
> old and has mostly been ignored, so even I forgot about it:
> 
> I've been coming to appreciate KDevelop, but there are a few usability
> issues that could see improvement:
> 
> - KDevelop settings (configuration) are (is) a mixed bag of global
> parameters and session-specific ones. It beats me for instance why the
> default project directory or coding style would only exist as per-setting
> parameters. I can see how one could want to override them on even a project
> level, but it'd be very nice if there were a way to configure these and
> other settings for all newly created sessions.

Known problem, patches welcome.

> - Editor windows. I must be part of a very small minority that prefers an
> IDE where each file is opened for editing in its own standalone window (as
> well as the other UI elements). Maybe the consensus is that such an
> environment wouldn't be an IDE but an EDE :)? Anyway, I've noticed that
> e.g. the documentation window can already be popped out (at least when it's
> docked to the side; the button is missing from the bottom dock position!).
> Why not extend this to edit windows?

The first step, of being able to detach editor views into separate windows, is 
also a known problem. Again: patches welcome.

Having all views in separate windows would then be implementable on top of 
that. I personally hate apps like the old Gimp that do that, but well - if you 
find a way to implement it that is nice and does not uglify the code 
horrendously then I'm OK with adding that as an optional setting.

> - Concerning that documentation window: when popped out, it doesn't get a
> full window status, but instead becomes floating. At least on OS X that
> makes it a top-level window that cannot be hidden by e.g. an editor window,
> making it less useful to pop it out. Also, it disappears when another
> application is made active, meaning one cannot do side-by-side comparisons
> between the info shown in the doc window and in a web browser, for
> instance. Is it technically possible to pop out to a full-featured window?

Sure, everything is technically possible. Someone just has to address this 
issue by - you'd guess it - writing a patch. Note that the behavior you 
describe is the default behavior of floating dock widgets. And having a way to 
alt-tab into kdevelop and bringing all floating widgets to foreground sounds 
like a good idea to me. But I can also see your point. Write a patch and we 
can discuss how to go forward with this.

> If any of the above suggestions/questions can be addressed by someone who's
> not a seasoned Qt/KDE dev (nor a highly expert C++ dev), I'd be happy to
> get some pointers and start tweaking!

Sure, learning by doing. Settings is going to be hard. The other should be 
doable. Look into sublime and how it handles Views and ToolViews. For editor 
views, making them top-level widgets by setting a null parent could be enough 
already, but then you'll also need to clean them up when the window gets 
closed etc. pp.

> I stripped the ObjC/kdev-clang bits from the ticket because from what I've
> seen kdev-clang is way out of my league. I still think though that even the
> regular/legacy C and C++ parsers could simply treat ObjC and ObjC as if
> they were standard C or C++, to get at least some for of code highlighting
> and a partial outline in the outline drop thingy.

There is preliminary ObjC support now with kdev-clang. If you want more, write 
patches for it.

Bye

> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> 
> Subject: [kdevplatform] [Bug 339142] Usability suggestions and questions
> Date: Sunday November 29 2015, 15:29:48
> From: Kevin Funk via KDE Bugzilla <bugzilla_noreply at kde.org>
> To: rjvbertin at gmail.com
> 
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339142
> 
> Kevin Funk <kfunk at kde.org> changed:
> 
>            What    |Removed                     |Added
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |RESOLVED
>          Resolution|---                         |INVALID
> 
> --- Comment #4 from Kevin Funk <kfunk at kde.org> ---
> Report is too vague; unspecific.
> 
> Please report separate issues and/or start a discussion on the mailing list.


-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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