GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 150593
Be able to dock dialogs in blank area under toolbox
Last modified: 2005-09-12 17:53:17 UTC
This is related to the problem that causes people to report things like bug 132207; the current behavior is I think bad from a usability standpoint: 1) Drag the tool options dialog away from the toolbox: it pops up to a separate dialog, leaving a big blank area under the main toolbox. 2) Drag the tool options dialog back to the big inviting blank area where it used to be. 3) Oops! The dialog changes position maybe, but remains separate. While some of us will then go on to aim for the tiny unmarked strip as a drop target, this is pretty confusing behavior. Dropping on the blank area ought to dock the dialog there.
If it was that easy, we'd have implemented that a long time ago already. Lowering priority since it's simply not doable with the current docks implementation.
Might as well confirm it, anyway, since it is a reasonable thing to want.
it might help disabuse people of trying to use this space as a target if the toolbox resized itself to clean up the dead space. In the standard dock the whole thing is a drop target. What if the standard tools were treated as just another docked Palette? (or would that make no different to the techincal difficulties?)
The right thing to do here is to change the separator that serves as dock target to expand so that it takes up the space which is now empty.
Fixed in CVS: 2005-09-11 Michael Natterer <mitch@gimp.org> * app/widgets/gimptoolbox.c (gimp_toolbox_book_added) (gimp_toolbox_book_removed): if there is no dockbook added, expand the separator and add a label telling the user that she can drop dockables there. Fixes bug #150593.
That doesn't work too well yet. There are two problems remaining: (1) The label is not line-wrapped properly. We probably need to make the separator a real widget and have it set the label width for this to work nicely. (2) The label is only added if the last dockable is removed. It won't appear and the separator won't expand if no dockable is ever added to a newly created dock.
Fixed again: 2005-09-12 Michael Natterer <mitch@gimp.org> Really fix bug #150593: * app/widgets/Makefile.am * app/widgets/widgets-types.h * app/widgets/gimpdockseparator.[ch]: new widget implementing the droppable separator bar in docks. * app/widgets/gimpdock.c: use it and removed local separator utility functions. * app/widgets/gimptoolbox.c: use GimpDockSeparator API to show/hide the label. Expand the separator initially. * themes/Default/gtkrc * themes/Small/gtkrc: the separator height style property moved from GimpDock to GimpDockSeparator.