[Openmcl-devel] IDE directions

[Gary Byers]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, alex crain wrote:

[how to handle "random typeout streams"]
>
> With that in mind, there are a few options:
> 1) use modal transient popups for these messages. The upside is that
> you get one message per popup and the popups are tied to a specific
> window. The windows don't need to be popups, they could easily be
> window shades like the current error messages. The downside is that you
> would have to close the message window before going back to work but
> they could be easily closable, like with a modal button tied to the
> return key.
>
> 2) Use non-modal popups. This means that you could leave the messages
> up for reference but if you were editing multiple files it might
> clutter things up a bit.
>
> 3) Use a common typeout window for everything. I'm thinking that when
> you booted up the IDE, a typeout window would be created and perhaps
> hidden with a toggle under the "Window" menu. When you do something
> that causes typeout, the typeout window would be raised and display the
> message.
>
> I'm leaning towards #3. Does anybody love/hate this idea?
>
> :alex
>

I tend to lean towards 3 as well.  Among other advantages, it sounds
like it might be fairly simple to implement (knock wood), and having
a good way to display messages (especially online help) soon is probably
better than having a great way (that we haven't thought of yet) later.

One other paradigm worth mentioning is the use of drawers (sort of
non-modal, per-window popups).  I don't know how well this would work
in practice, but there might be some advantage (down the road) to
keeping "per-window informational messages" separate from  "globally
relevant ones", and drawers and split views and tabbed views, and
... are all possible ways of handling the per-window case.