Bennett Helm wrote:
Perhaps the biggest UI problem on Mac concerns the recent addition of a
button on the left of the tab bar to hide a document within that window.
I don't know how it is on other platforms, but on Mac clicking that
button simply makes the document disappear without a trace ... unless
you know to look in the View menu. I'm sure many Mac users will think
that they have closed the document and, because there is no chance to
save it before it disappears, will likely panic thinking they have lost
some work.
I thought about this when I added it. I understanding it can be
confusing but this is really needed IMHO. The main reason is to support
correctly multipart document. I would like to make LyX open
automatically all child documents in the background (i.e. without having
a work area affected to them). The other reason is that I want to
arrange the tabs in each window independently. Taking this last argument
into account, the only way we can avoid the user panic described above
is to disable support of multi-view of a same document.
It is also possible to then close all visible documents,
attempt to quit LyX, and have a hidden document (that you thought had
been lost) pop up, asking for you to save it. Such surprises shouldn't
be allowed to happen: there needs to be a visual indication of which
documents are open.
I agree this can be disturbing if you are not used to it (I am obviously
:-)) I've thought about a red light somewhere in the status bar (or just
next to the close button) that would pop up a combo for hidden
documents. Do you reckon it will be enough?
On Mac, hiding a document is typically done by
minimizing the window containing it to the Dock, something which is
already possible. Of course, I realize the intent of the new feature is
different than this, but I don't see any way to implement this new
feature without confusion.
Me neither. So I guess we will need some user options because I don't
want to degrade _my_ user experience :-)
This all makes me wonder if now is the time to transition LyX (at least
on Mac) to the Mac standard model of one document per window, so that
creating a new document (or opening an existing document) results by
default in a new window; similarly closing a document ought normally
close the window. Of course, this is consistent with being able to have
multiple tabs in a single window; I'm suggesting that the default should
be to create a new window for each file. I've tried faking this by
binding, e.g., <Cmd>N to "command-sequence window-new ; buffer-new", and
binding <Cmd><Opt>N to "buffer-new"; however, this is unsatisfactory
when (a) launching LyX brings up a window with the LyX banner and no
open document (the default is to open a new document window unless the
sessions file indicates to open other documents) and
MS Word always creates a new document when you launch it maybe we should
do this also when there is no sessions file?
(b) closing the
last window causes LyX to quit (see bug #2, below).
Some bugs with the current implementation:
1. The keybinding to switch among documents (i.e., from one tab of a
window to the next) does not currently work.
I'll have a look.
2. Closing the last window causes LyX to exit. This should not happen on
Mac.
This is related to a bugzilla entry about unique instance. How would you
exit LyX on Mac.
3. Without any tabs open, there is a rather large, empty, gray band at
the top of the window (see screenshot). That area is mostly filled by
the tabbar, but it should not be there when the tabbar is absent.
That's a bug of Qt/Mac I guess as the work area is automatically resized
when there is no tabbar.
A
related -- and even pickier -- issue is that the whole document area
seems to be set in a frame (again, see screenshot), which on Mac at
least normally is absent. (Thus, on Mac the white area for text normally
extends all the way to the edge of the window, with no border at all.)
If you hit F11 and F11 again the frame disappears right? If yes, we can
get rid of it. Possibly for all platforms.
4. Using a keybinding to close a buffer and then the window that
contained it (command-sequence buffer-close ; window-close) results in a
crash. Curiously, doing this via the command buffer works fine. Here's
the backtrace:
Should be fixed now.
Abdel.
