Re: Side-by-side documents

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ariman ee>]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Renaud wrote:

> Well, actually we have to try different things, and ideas are welcome !
> Here's the goal : say you have 3 or 4 documents open, we would like an 
> easy way for the user to be able to have any 2 of the 4 documents 
> side-by-side, and change the documents displayed quickly.
> 
> Notebook-style is great to change the displayed document, but having 2 
> notebooks (both having tabs for all 4 documents) might be a bit 
> weird.
> Paned view is more 'traditional', but then we lose the notebook 
> possibilities. 
> 
> By the way Window in Window wouldn't fit at all :-)

Actually, I once wrote about more general paned view - something like
hybrid of WiW and paning.

In WiW you actually need:
- Arbitrarily sized documents side-by-side, possibly covering each others
partially or completely
You do not need:
- WM decorations
- Moving windows behind the border of main window

For me ideal paned MDI would allow:
- divide viewport arbitrarily between documents
+-----+---+  +----+-----+ +--+----+---+
|     |   |  |    |     | |  |    |   |  etc.
|     |   |  +----+     | |  +----+   |
+-----+---+  +----------+ +-----------+

Traditional    Corner        Side
   paned      attached     attached

- handles for stretching, moving, raising, lowering, maximizing,
minimizing views (views - not windows - and the BIGGEST MISTAKE would be
to make handles look like WM controls - they are separate things)
- handles for dragging views from/to main window

In my imaginations handles should look like notebook tabs, with some
additional controls. Also views should be reasonably sticky and attach
themselves to window borders/each other.

Lauris