Moving notebook entries around - within the same window

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> Yes, I looked at the patch. My comment was about your suggestion that
> 'we should perhaps kill the "create separate windows" version entirely'.
>
> THAT is what I object to.

Umm. If that is what you objected to, why didn't you say so? The patch
actually leaves all three behaviors as options, so I don't understand
your objection.

> And I find the way that you implement the transition from the current
> notebook to this one window with three areas design (for a lack of a
> better term) rather odd.

Uhh. You don't actually have to do the three-area version: the point
is that you can do a two-area version too.

I really get the feeling that you didn't really try it out. There's
real breakage there (ie the resizing doesn't work due to the use of
tables), but your complaints seem to be elsewhere, and based on not
actually playing with it.

For example, the whole "gets us back to where we used to be" isn't
even true. Yes, you can drag the dive list down (an dmake it a
two-panel one), and now it's basically the same as we had at one
point. Or you can do the two-panel one the other way (drag the dive
list to the side), and you get the really original look with the list
of dives on the left side.

So it's not that there is a "transition to a three area design".
Rather, there's a "you can drag the panels to different places".

> As I mentioned I'd rather do this with a config option than with magic
> tiny drop zones.

I do agree that I'd much rather have it as a "latch on to" behavior
with window borders just latching together, and I wonder if something
like that exists under gtk. I also do think that whatever layout you
choose might well be saved as a config setting, so that you don't have
to do it over and over again. But if you think this is some kind of
"different mode" you're definitely missing the point. The point is
exactly that it is *not* a different mode, it's just a more flexible
version that allows the "windows" to be tied together (or dragged
apart again) depending on what you think works for you.

And the "single window" thing definitely works better from a UI
standpoint when you have other things going on at the same time and
are moving windows around. The three-window model is fairly annoying
when you have to look for the windows and bring them all forward from
behind the browser or whatever other window individually.

The fact that I can't find any other model than the notebook pages to
"latch" the windows together is kind of sad. And perhaps just me not
knowing gtk well enough.

                        Linus