nick/settings-manager needs testing

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:50:23 +0100, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. :)

>> * 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.

Sounds ok. This is no "visual regression" anyway, so not really a 
concern. The demo app just looked a bit sexier.

>> * 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.

Cool, thanks!
 
>> * 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.

Right, expanders will also make keyboard navigation more annoying 
(unless they are removed from the focus chain, which on the other hand
may be undesired by some). I agree, let's not use them. Separators
might be an improvement though.

  - Jannis