Re: [Gretl-devel] GUI matters
Am 09.11.2014 um 21:24 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
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.
...
(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.
I've experienced it now and I think it's fine.
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
But does that mean there's no GUI way of going back?
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?
Well it's hard here to come to non-subjective conclusions. I predict
that soon bundles will be as frequent as matrices used to be, so is the
next step to disable the pop-up for bundles when they proliferate? It
seems to me that at the bottom of this is really the issue that this
icon view concept is not really clear about what its aim is.
To be honest, IMHO the most natural thing would be to integrate the
listing/display of such objects into the main window (where other
objects are also displayed, namely series). Admittedly that resembles a
bit what Eviews does (although I haven't used Eviews for quite some
time), and in general it's certainly driven by a preference for a
unified-window-UI. So it's a bit of a sensitive issue I guess.
thanks,
sven