[Gretl-devel] gretl windows

Thanks to Lee Adkins and others for the design ideas that have been floated recently. I'll try to respond to these one by one. Lee says (and I agree) that in an extended gretl GUI session it's easy to get lost in a big stack of gretl windows. To counteract this he suggests that the script editor be "tabbed" (so it can hold several script files, one per tab), and maybe the model output window should have the same treatment. Personally I don't much like tabbed windows. With scripts I generally like to to have the windows side by side, or partially overlapped, to facilitate copy/paste and comparison, and for model output I like to be able to compare side-by-side or above and below. But I realize that some people do like tabs and I've started to experiment with a tabbed script editor (not ready for public testing yet). In the meantime I've been working on another way of overcoming the "lost in a stack of windows" effect; the results are now in CVS and snapshots. For some time (I don't know how many people have noticed) some gretl windows have had a little "Windows" icon (it shows two overlapped windows) in the toolbar. If you click on the icon it pops up a list of your open gretl windows -- and if you select one it comes to the top of the stack. Up till now that hasn't been very useful: many windows didn't have that icon so you couldn't rely on it as a means of navigation. What I've done recently is (a) put that icon into almost all windows and (b) spruce up the appearance of the pop-up list a bit. To expand on "almost all windows": this icon should now appear in all windows that have an icon-based toolbar (if it doesn't show in any of those, that's a bug). Graphs haven't had a toolbar up till now, but I've added a discreet one in the bottom right corner. The main gretl window had window-list functionality, but uselessly buried under the "View" menu; I've now moved it to the main toolbar. And in the model window, which can't have an icon-based toolbar because the menu concepts are much too abstract, I've added the same functionality via a top-level "Windows" menu item. Please try it and tell me what you think. The idea is that from any one gretl window (with a few relatively unimportant exceptions) you should have a quick means of navigating to any other gretl window. Allin