[Gretl-devel] Re: The post-conference GUI arrangement thread

Hi all, Sven, thanks for initiating this thread. I support the idea that re-factoring the GUI is useful! Let me just collect some ideas in an unstructured manner -- maybe some items are of help: - Configurable themes -- as the editor already supports -- is very useful. However, currently only the editor field changes towards a different design style but not remaining gretl GUI elements. This looks inconsistent (even though personally I don't really care about it). - At the very beginning, I was annoyed by the separate main and editor windows. But I got used to it, and nowadays I like the flexibility it offers even though most of the time I have a fix arrangements of windows. Personally I am not a big fan of fixed window structures, as the 'optimal' arrangement depends very much on the use case (programming, debugging, visual inspection by clicking through the menu etc.) - Following the idea of Eviews limits flexibility as such that one could not move a separate window to another virtual desktop (which I use heavily) for instance. Some other programs such as Matlab have the option to detach certain elements. But re-attaching can become tedious. - Keep the CLI window optional (I rarely use it as writing a command, highlighting it and executing it through "Ctrl+r" within in the editor window is quickly done). - However, adding a 2nd tab to the CLI window which includes a shell terminal for executing shell commands (git control?) -- as in RStudio or IntelliJ -- would be nice but has no high priority I guess. - I've got the impression that for professional programmers the "IntelliJ" IDE (URL: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea) seems to be _the_ current state-of-the-art editor. I use it for Python projects and it has nice features indeed -- even though the whole package is not really suited for typical data science work. The Spyder IDE (URL: https://www.spyder-ide.org) is another alternative which is similar to RStudio but feels more structured. Maybe it's worth to take a closer look at it. - A list of defined functions at the side of the editor: For larger projects with many functions written down in a single file it becomes quite difficult to locate these quickly. If one could jump directly to a function by clicking at its name, that would be useful I guess. Ok, that's it for now. Best, Artur Am 21.06.19 um 09:31 schrieb Sven Schreiber: