[Thunar-dev] next step in thunar development

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jeff Franks wrote:
> Benny,
> 
> I've been going through thunar.xmi and the layout seems to look good, 
> but I do have a question about ThunarView. The name is confusing because 
> "View" is usually applied to a physical widget, such as you have done 
> with ThunarTreeView and ThunarIconView, but ThunarView is an interface. 
> Is it really needed? If so, for consistency wouldn't it be better to 
> give it a name that ended in "Model", like ThunarWindowModel or something.

No, a model provides access to data, while a view provides a view of a 
model, which is exactly what ThunarView (or better it's subclasses do).

> Shouldn't ThunarDesktopView derive from ThunarIconView since it still 
> needs to implement all the same basic icon stuff. The only difference is 
> that ThunarDesktopView needs to implement icon position and persistence 
> data, something appropriate for a derived class to do.

That would require to export quite a lot of internals from 
ThunarIconView in order for ThunarDesktopView to override it, which is 
generally a bad idea. Also, ThunarDesktopView must work on multiple 
screens/monitors, which cannot easily be implemented in 
ThunarIconView/ExoIconView without adding too much otherwise unrequired 
code.

> I was looking at ExoIconView and did a diff with GtkIconView.  Since it 
> is always best to try and minimize  code bloat - Why did you feel the 
> need to re-implement  GtkIconView?  As far as I could see there wasn't a 
> great difference. You removed some properties, and a few odd lines of 
> code, and replaced all occrrences of GTK and gtk with EXO and exo 
> respectively. Is there a good reason yuo did this?

ExoIconView dates back to a time where Gtk was in it's very early 2.5 
stage. I synced ExoIconView with one of the latest 2.5 GtkIconView's 
again. We'll have to evaluate later whether we need functionality in 
ExoIconView, that isn't provided by GtkIconView or if there are problems 
with GtkIconView (for example, I think the layouting is quite slow with 
GtkIconView, and I have ideas how to improve that in ExoIconView).

> Regards,
> Jeff.

greets,
Benedikt
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