Re: 16 (Re: Infrastructural complexity.)

[Thomas Lord]

On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 08:47 +0200, Lennart Borgman wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Thomas Lord<address@hidden> wrote:
> > _______
> >  _______________________________
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |  ~~~control~~~panel~~~area  |
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |_________|_________|_________|
> >  |         | main    |         |
> >  |   ~~    | edit    |   ~~    |
> >  |         | area    |         |
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |_________|_________|_________|
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |  ~~~control~~~panel~~~area  |
> >  |         |         |         |
> >  |_________|_________|_________|
> >
> >
> >
> > 16 possible layouts of control
> > panel frames:
> >
> > _______
> > |_____|    NNSS  0
> > |_|_|_|
> > |_____|
> >
> >
> > _______
> > |_____|    NNSs  1
> > |_|_| |
> > |___|_|
> 
> 
> Thanks, that made it easier to think about it.


It took me a few days to come up with 
the NNSS notation.  I knew there had to be
a good notation but it was a little bit hard
to find one.  I'm glad it paid off.



> It looks like a good approximation for text terminals and the current
> Emacs GUI where we do not have floating child frames. (In OS level
> terms it is child windows, of course). And it looks like an idea to
> level ECB things to a more general level.


Let's talk about floating child frames separately,
a little later.

> Is your goal making this a user-level changeable layout framework
> (within these 16 layouts)? Logically it seems pretty easy with
> functions like:
> 
> - left-panel-enlarge-upwards
> - left-panel-enlarge-downwards
> etc.
> 
> - hide-left-panel
> - show-left-panel
> etc.


I was just pacing the floor thinking roughly
the same.  Yeah, in most cases, users get control
over those 8 bits of params.

> - (swap-panels 'left 'top)

> This seems to be easy to implement on the elisp level,

I don't see how, c.f. Miles' comments recently.  I mean,
you need some C-level hackery to have the "five frames
in one systems window, configurable by those eight bits"
but then, sure, you can make all the behaviour of that nice
by hacking at the elisp level.

>  but I do not
> know how easy it is for a user to grasp the idea.
> 

It's such a nice simple little, almost "physical"
abstraction.  It's visceral.  I take my inspiration
from things like HP calculators and visicalc.  My
(subjective) instinct is that users will love it although
many will need a little bit of a tutorial to grok it.
(FWIW)

-t