[MonoDevelop] Suggested change to navigation drop-down behaviour

[IBBoard]

On 04/07/10 04:39, Michael Hutchinson wrote:
> FWIW, I think that all regions should be shown at the "level" at which
> they're defined. Take a look at what I did for regions in the document
> outline view for C# files. They're effectively arbitrary groupings at
> any level.
> 

That's basically what I was thinking - to me the navigation is basically
an outline that you can jump through that shows a compact breadcrumb of
where you are.

Eclipse doesn't have to cope with regions, but they have introduced a
breadcrumb bar that can be very useful. One difference there is that
theirs is package wide, so it behaves more like the Windows Vista
Explorer navigation at all levels - click the namespace one and you get
a list of all namespaces you could look at. That's probably a slightly
different widget to what Mike is trying to create, though, with a
slightly wider scope.

Skipping back to Mike's email:

> Press home for that - there is no need to navigate to a different
> level - why anyone should do that ?

That's still a button press or a click either way. If I've got a class
in a namespace with some methods in a region and some methods outside
and if I'm within the region but want to navigate to a method outside
the region then I've currently got to click outside of the region or
press Ctrl+Home to get to the top of the page so that I can use the nav.
Either of those actions is something different that I've got to do to
get the nav to do what I want. What I was suggesting provides the user
with all of the interaction they need in one place, which seems more
consistent.

> The 1st navigator doesn't affect the following ones.

It seemed to when I used it (clicking a region only showed stuff in that
region). If it doesn't affect the following ones but each following one
affects its following ones then it wouldn't seem like an intuitive and
easily discoverable behaviour from exploration. The more similarity
there is within a widget the better, in general.

> I don't intend to put a different level selector in the tree - this
> would complicate things too much. atm it's very clear [REGION] ->
> [LOGICAL STRUCTURE].

If you're going to keep that structure then I still think that you need
a "no region" option as soon as you have regions, and the file seems as
logical a "no region" item as any. If you don't then you end up needing
to either do funny navigations or deciding that everything needs to be
in a region.