Forums Feature Suggestions Windowing reform

Playing with the new positioning for the toolbar, and the treebar, i noticed a number of issues with these 'bars':

1. The treebar can't be docked on the top or bottom, even though khaled says it can in the release notes.

2. Theres no way to specify which thing is "farthest" to one direction (say I have the toolbar *and* the treebar docked left, theres no way to change the order they appear in).

3. Theres no way to sub-dock, for example, theres no way to dock the toolbar to the left, but within the confines of the switchbar's 'bottom' dock. Thus, things docked to the top and bottom will only "flow" between things docked to the left and right, and can never flow under or above these things like they can in most programs with docking ability (e.g. Windows taskbar).

4. Theres no way to change the color or image of the switchbar buttons. I had to change my entire windows theme to make the buttons look right with a switchbar background I wanted to use.

5. As mentioned in my other post, treebar colors should be seperate from switchbar colors because they don't look good together.

6. Since we're going all out with positioning, it only stands to reason that there should be an option to "pin" the nickname lists from all channels into a "nickbar" that can be docked or floated like a desktop window.

7. Not that I care much about this one, but in all fairness, the menu bar should be able to change position to (like in other apps (e.g. Word)).

8. I, too, believe that the color options dialog box should be completely redone. On the left should have a tree (much like the options dialog) with the options: "Channel, Query, DCC Chat, Server, Switchbar, Treebar, Menubar, Nicklist, Notify, Channel List, Links List, URL list, Edit box (Active), Edit box (Inctive)", and allow you to set the colors, background, background options, etc for each of those, along with default positions, etc. All the junk that's hidden in the "right click" menu's. And obviously provide scripting access to this.

2. Would be nice

6. Not sure i like this, what would happen to this new dock if the nicklist for the channel was turned off or you switched to a custom window? What if you like different left/right/off nicklist settings for different channels?, it would have to rebuild it everytime you switched window. Or would such features not be availible? hmm

8. It could be hard to figure out where some color settings belong (like quits/notices/joins/parts/ctcps/etc) since you can customise which windows these are displayed in...

So if the overhaul is ever done a 'default' at the top with everything in it (exactly how it is now in terms of what you can choose the colors for) would be a good idea. In tune with this would be to add a new color state along side all the colors you can already choose. This new color 'state' would tell mirc to use the default color for that item under those circumstances (ie part from channel). That way if you set the part color for 'channel' to bright yellow, but change mirc to display parts in status, it could automatically use the default part color instead of either assuming the same color or having to manually define the part color in the 'status' section as well. (have the option to define the part color for status section by all means, but if the color was set to the new 'use default' state it would do just that rather than assume to use it from the channel section).

You could possibly even allow the user to add custom sections, along side a new /window flag, to define with color section to use for that window. Could be quite useful for custom windows or rebuilt channel windows etc. eg, if you were to rebuild the channel window you could use the new window flag to specify that it should use the channel color section or a custom section.

And yes, a command to modify the colors in such an overhaul (as well as change the new 'use default' state) would be essential.

Of corse it stands to reason that the default for any new installation, or upgrade from a mirc with the 'old' color settings would be for the 'default' section to be filled with the default mirc colors or with the colors from your previous configuration and for all the rest to be set to 'use defaul'.