[Gretl-devel] GUI matters

There are a couple of aspects of the gretl GUI that have been bothering me: (1) the matter of what should happen to the output when you execute a script and there's already a script output window open; and (2) the matter of auto-showing, or not, the "icon view" window when something happens that might be of interest in "icon" terms. There are now some relevant innovations in CVS and snapshots. I'd like to invite testing and comments. Here's a brief account of each of the things mentioned above. 1) Script output: when there's a already a script output window open, we offer a three-way choice of what to do: (a) re-use the existing window, replacing its content; (b) re-use the window, adding to its content; (c) leave the old window alone and open a new one for the new output. For a long time in gretl's history it was (a) with no choice; then (b) was requested and implemented some years back; then (c) came along too and -- I don't quite remember why -- (c) became the default. Ever since option (b) arrived, a choice has been available via the "push-pin" icon in the script output window, which pops up a little dialog. However, this may not be obvious unless you know to look for it. And for people working with scripts this choice can be quite important. IMO each of the three options has its place, but if you're stuck with one that's wrong for you it's liable to be quite annoying, as follows: (a) "Huh, gretl just trashed my last output!" (b) "It's confusing to have output pile up like that!" (c) "Why does gretl keep opening all these damn windows?!" So I wanted to make the choice more obvious. The default for a new installation of gretl is now "none of the above", that is, an "unset" value for this choice. And if the value is unset then the first time the choice becomes relevant we pop up a version of the "push-pin" dialog, with a note pointing out where you can change gretl's behaviour in future. For existing gretl installations, if you just went with the default value (c) that will now be taken as "unset" and you should see the new dialog when you run a script with a script window open. If you already changed the setting and you'd like to check out the new dialog you can edit your ~/.gretl2rc file: set the variable "script_output_policy" to 0. (Look for the "stickiness" line.) # stickiness of output script_output_policy = 0 2) icon view: for some time now the default has been to display the icon view window whenever a model, graph, matrix or bundle icon is added -- with the option of turning this off under /Tools/Preferences. Under the default, the thing I found most annoying was having the icon view pop up whenever I ran a script that generated a matrix. So for now I've disabled that: simply generating a matrix will not open the icon view under the default policy. Any thoughts on that? Does anyone like having the icon view auto-open for matrices? Should we maybe have a three-position switch: on for all icons, on for models and graphs only, off for everything? Allin