Some UI suggestions

[StApostol]

While CB is a great IDE for managing multiple projects/build targets at once is great, there are some (rather small) issues that hamper its usability:

a) (and probably the most important): Please, make the "open files & workspace" window dockable or at least provide an option to place it on the right. I believe this is much less distracting (since most of us read left to right, this window tends to draw the eyes from the code).

b) (still very important): An autohide feature for the above window and the message (down) would be great. These are not needed continuously when writing code and cover a lot of expensive screen-estate. Indeed, just providing a "close" option on the right of the "To-Do list" (just like Dev-Cpp does) would help a lot. The 2003 msvc IDE is great on this account.

c) (somewhat less important): Some people like long & descriptive target names (something like "CS Test1 Mingw(3.4.2) Release"). The current build target menu is way too small for this. Could you provide an option setting its width (so people with larger resolutions could increase it), or make a tooltip appear with the complete description on mouse hover? Also there is a 32 pixel unwanted space between the "Build Target:" caption and this menu.

Please give these a shot. I think the first two would greatly enhance the IDE (indeed that's mostly why I don't use CB as my primary IDE but only for building multiple targets).

(NOTE: I realise that this is not only windows related, feel free to move this post to the correct place if it doesn't belong here.)

[rickg22]

a) Is planned, will be available when the conversion to XRC is finished. However, we're having problems on that.

b) The autohide isn't planned - however, it can be implemented by deriving a class from wxNotebook which would implement dev's behavior (auto-hide on demand, close button). If you can help us implementing this we'd really appreciate it, since auto-hide is a feature we've been asked quite a few times.

c) We're having problems with the toolbar on windows. wxToolbar is _VERY_ primitive - i haven't found a way to implement multi-line toolbars on windows with the wxToolbar class, and AFAIK, there's no way for a frame to have two or more toolbars at the same time.

So we've had no choice but to wait until dockable toolbars can be implemented. If you can implement a custom toolbar-like class, we'd also appreciate it.

Sorry to say this, but we're as frustrated as you are.

[mandrav]

a) We 're not using a dockable windows lib yet. But it can be done. Submit a feature request please.

b) F2 and shift-F2 hide/unhide the manager tree and the message tabs.
Auto-hiding is more difficult than it sounds. C::B isn't a monolithic app knowing, at any time, exactly what happens in its internals. Much of it functionality is provided by plugins. Who's to say when the message tabs show/hide ? Who's to know which plugin needs to show it at a given time? More importantly, who's to know when it's safe to hide it. Obviously a system must be developed for this...

c) As Rick explained, toolbar's are very limited. Until a solution is found, the target combo can't change size. Already as it is now, the toolbar is only fully visible at 1024x768 resolution which is not good...
I don't know if you 've noticed but you can select another target by using the menu Compiler->Select target...

Thanks for your suggestions,
Yiannis.

[mandrav]

Never mind about "a". I just added it in CVS

Yiannis.

[tiwag]

Never mind about "a". I just added it in CVS

Yiannis.

i just updated it from cvs and tried it.

works fine as long as you have at least one source window opened,
but there obviously exists a screen-update bug if not.

a screeenshot before and after moving Manager position from left to right