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
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