[Glade-devel] Re-ordering the glade-3 palette

[Joaquin Cuenca Abela]

Paolo wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 16:52 +0100, Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
> > Archit wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hey
> > > 
> > > I don't know who decided it, but the palette in all the 
> versions of 
> > > glade till now is a hotch-potch imho. Except for 
> GtkWindow which is 
> > > right in the beginning most of the widgets are just 
> thrown in there. 
> > > What I suggest is that we reorder the items in the 
> palette in order 
> > > of the use. Like after GtkWindow the most used is the GtkHBox and 
> > > GtkVBox. Why have them in the 7th row when they should be 
> in the 1st 
> > > or the 2nd row. Same can be done for others.
> > 
> > I thinking about a more radical restructuration, like having each 
> > widget on a line (pixmap next to its name).  A bit like 
> what other RADs do.
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure... wouldn't this lead to a much longer list, 
> beside the current way is similar to other tools like the 
> Gimp or Dia. Can you post some screenshots of the other RADs 
> you mention?

Not right now, as I don't have them here. The whole .NET RADs have them
layed out like that.

Yes, that leads to a longer list. It's not something I want to do because it
looks better, but because it makes it easier to find a particular widget.

I have to look many times at the tooltips to see if I'm indeed selecting the
right widget. Many widgets look almost the same, and thus the icons are
similar. I think the label is most of the time necessary to pick the right
widget.

That's not the same as with The Gimp or Dia.

In Dia the label is indeed even more confusing than the icon (broken line
with an arrow?).

And I don't know why, but it happens rarelly that I have to take a look at
the tooltip in the Gimp.

> > While we're at it, a restructuration of the placement of the widget 
> > would also be desirable, but of passing from a random placement to 
> > another (probably saner) placement, I would like to just 
> put the items 
> > in alphabetical order.
> > 
> > I'm not yet sure, however, that it's a good idea...
> > 
> 
> Is it worth the pain?
> A really simple things we can do however is better split the 
> catalogs, like moving some seldom used stuff in "Additional" 
> or create a "Standard dialogs" catalog for FileSelector, 
> Image selector etc.

In fact, it's extremelly easy to do (I've already done it in my local tree
in <1h). Now, I agree 100% with you that things should get splitted. That's
nice with the current layout, and a must if we layout them using a pixbuf +
text.

There was an old alternative layout in glade-2 that separated widgets in:

Toplevel widgets
Containers
Standard widgets
Data entry

We can add another Obsolete category, and try that...

Cheers,