[MonoDevelop] Suggested change to navigation drop-down behaviour

[Piotr Wysocki]

Hi,

The behaviour bothered me too.
I like your change.  So I'm for it :)

Cheers


On 06/21/2010 08:54 PM, IBBoard wrote:
 > Hi all,
 >
 > I'm sending this email at the suggestion of Mike Krueger [1], who I've
 > been bombarding with bugs and suggestions for the past month or so.
 > Luckily he has been friendly and willing to fix/add/discuss my
 > suggestions, so it has been a good experience.
 >
 > One suggestion that I made that Mike isn't so sure about is a change to
 > the behaviour of the Class/Type drop-down at the top of the editor when
 > the open file only contains a single class [2]. Currently, nothing is
 > selected in the drop-down and so you've got to pick the only class from
 > the list before you can pick a method/property from the second
 > drop-down. In the "one class per file" use case then this seems like an
 > extra click for no benefit.
 >
 > My suggestion is that the behaviour should be to select the class that
 > can be unambiguously identified as the "current" class. If there are
 > multiple classes then that would result in the current behaviour of
 > selecting based on where the cursor is, or using the drop-down to poke
 > the event in the opposite direction. If there is only one class in the
 > file then there is no ambiguity between it and another class within that
 > file and so I think it would help usability to treat any location within
 > the file as being "the class" with regards what the drop-down selects.
 >
 > This isn't how Mike had planned for it to be used, but I think it makes
 > sense in this situation. Rather than looking at as "the drop-down shows
 > the class your cursor is in", I'm looking at is as "the drop-down shows
 > the class you're working with". If there's only one class in a file then
 > that "class you're working with" is unambiguous and so a selection could
 > be made anyway. Once an extra class is added to the same file then it
 > should drop back to the current multiple classes in a file behaviour.
 >
 > If anyone wants to test out the suggested behaviour then I've already
 > made and submitted a patch [3] - hopefully my description above makes
 > sense! Do people prefer the current behaviour and the extra click or do
 > people think that my suggested patch makes sense for this situation?


-- 
Piotr Wysocki
Mobile Systems Research Labs, Poznan University of Technology