nick/settings-manager needs testing

[Nick Schermer]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:
>
> Hey,
>
> On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:31:17 +0100, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Last evening I've pushed the category-based settings dialog. Maybe
>> some folks can give it a shot.
>>
>> Big changes:
>> - Category-based.
>> - Uses Garcon for items
>> - Pluggable dialogs by default (you can't disable it).
>
> Yay, I like all three points! Things I noticed:
>
> * most of the items are in the "Other" category on this machine,
>  even with latest garcon from master installed. I wonder whether
>  that is expected behavior (haven't looked into it in detail yet)?

We need to set the categories in the various desktop files.

> * when navigating to non-visible items with the keyboard, the settings
>  manager does not scroll to make them visible automatically

Mmm, ok. Will add this.

> * in the demo app you posted on IRC on Sunday, the active item had a
>  selection box around the icon and label, which I think was due to
>  GtkIconView; with ExoIconView the icon/labels each have their own
>  small selection box. Can we somehow make it look like with a
>  GtkIconView? I thought that looked really good!

In gtk3 we can, exo has a couple of advantages: good single click (but
that is easy to simulate) and follow-state emission, gtk has this in
gtk3.
So I think we should keep it like this and switch to gtkiconview when
we port to gtk3.

> * Like I mentioned on IRC the other day, I think we should move the
>  "<= All Settings" button between the header and content, and add
>  a filter entry like we have in the MIME editor. Categories take
>  up more vertical space, which will cause some items to be out of
>  the visible range on many machines. Also, if we allow more items
>  than just our own dialogs to show up in the settings manager, the
>  number will quickly become large enough to justify a filter.

Ok fine, will add this. Had this in mind as well.

> * I wonder if the category titles are prominent enough visually.
>  Maybe we can indicate the hierarchy in a stronger way, e.g. by
>  using expanders (which will show an arrow and allow to collapse
>  categories---perhaps permanently?). One alternative could be to
>  render a horizontal separator below the titles, I think that's
>  how KDE does it.

Separator is possible, will look into this. Personally I don't really
care about the titles: the obvious icon groups are important.
Expanders are overkill, we should keep it simple/stupid.

Nick