World: r3wp

I just got crash, when clicking into the field, R3 vanished.I will 
try with new session.

Henrik, other than that, marking the text is really buggy. Here's 
few things RMA needs to look into:


- go to the area, type enough text, sot  that it scrolls, and then:

        - when you are at the bottom of the area, just press shift + up arrow, 
        to hilite the text - only one line is hilited -  the alghoritm is 
        buggy

        - go to the top. Try the reverse - shift + down arrow - it hilites 
        the text correctly, unless you hit bottom, then it starts to hilite 
        from the beginning, and cycles forever. It should just stop at the 
        bottom


- the most troublesome behaviour though is, that when you move out 
from the bounds of the style, it stops hilighting. Simply an event 
flow is bad here. We should treat it like pop-up menus - receiving 
events even if outside of the window, while in mouse-down mode. That 
is absolutly needed, or the experience is highly uncomfortable - 
just try to hilite the field - once your mose goes away, it stops 
the hilite. That might be the reason why you think it is slow ...

OK, thanks. I think there will be one big session where general text 
handling is going to be fixed. Probably somewhere when rich text 
editing is going to be done.

yes, the current text editting/selection code is still from the old 
'carls version'. Review is planned.

henrik i confirm the bug on the text selection

thanks, Claude

I just want to ask - as you did some nice improvements in the View 
kernel, will it be "backported" (?) into RT's branch of source code? 
Is there any communication with Carl even for RMA's purposes?

backport: I don't know.

Carl: No, silence at the moment. We are waiting too.

'will it be "backported" (?) into RT's branch of source code?' - 
As was announced, the RT's branch of source code is currently managed 
by RMA, and ported to keep being compatible with the new hostkit 
updates. What exactly is "backport"?

Do you want us to spend any effort on trying to backport the code 
to be runnable in the older hostkit?

perhaps the correct term is "merged into Carl's source tree".

yes, merged, sorry. Simply put that when Carl reappears, and starts 
eventually to proceed with RT's releases, to not find ourselve in 
a situation, when Carl uses old and different hostkit View sources 
...

Carl *is* merging the hostkit changes

ok, good to hear that ...

Please, check the http://www.rebol.net/wiki/R3_GUI_terminologyarticle. 
I hope, that is describes some of the terminological issues we are 
trying to solve.

User poll questions:


1) Do you find the 'a layout' and 'layout style' notions to improve 
the current 'a panel' ambiguous terminogy, or do you prefer something 
else?

2) Which of the three [[hpanel vpanel] [panel vpanel] [panel panel 
vertical]] alternatives do you prefer?

2-2

2-2

[hpanel  vpanel]

2-2 - comment - if we stay with align valign, then let's go panel 
vpanel, group vgroup. I think that vertical option will not be used 
so often, and so the code will be nicely readable with just panel, 
group?

My first choice is [hpanel vpanel], for explicitness, but if Petr 
is right (having used the system), [panel vpanel] won't be bad.

1st choice: [panel vpanel] for the compatibility with the existing 
official doc, and for the compactness
2nd choice: [hpanel vpanel]

if we wish to generalise, then [ panel 0 panel 90 ] so that in future 
we can go [ panel -45 panel +45 ] 
Can this GUI do this?

Notes:


1) not seeing any reactions to the question, am I to understand it 
means agreement?
2) the favourite seems to be 2-2 currently

- regarding Graham's panel -45 question: if 2-2 is chosen, then this 
alternative would need to be panel-45. Somebody may define such a 
style, but it does not exist now.

1) no clue. didn't read the gui terminology recently

2) same reason as Pekr -- love conciseness

and closeness to natural language

*Please*, do not answer the poll questions without reading the article.

The wording of the http://www.rebol.net/wiki/R3_GUI_terminologyarticle 
corrected and enhanced.

Maybe we're just tired of user polls, or we don't have the time to 
dig into this. If you don't have a clear view of what a good GUI 
should be, and therefore need polls, then maybe use some time to 
get a clear view. Only suggestions. :-)


I looked into it quickly, and I would at this point go for just have 
panel, letting vertical be a layout-mode option. Reason: K.I.S.S. 
(and vertical is an option anyway). And if you support user-defined 
styles (I'm not sure, you do, as I'm not very much into R3 GUI), 
then programmers can just make their own vpanels, if they need it. 
If I, as new to some GUI, can get it up and running in a very short 
time, because it's so simple, that's a huge benefit.

consistency over conciseness for me, so perhaps 2-2, if that's what 
we already have, otherwise I would prefer 2-1.

If you don't have a clear view of what a good GUI should be, and 
therefore need polls, then maybe use some time to get a clear view
 - interesting point, should make a note

You might not have noticed, but the reason why I am using polls is 
to make something that you would find preferable to other altermatives. 
If you don't know what you prefer, then, you are free to not answer.

In the case of the above poll, all alternatives have their advantages, 
as is already mentioned in the article. That is why a "good GUI" 
can use any of the alternatives. A "preferable GUI" should use the 
one the majority prefers.

Aha, I did not notice the smilie at the and :-)

err: "end"

I guess, it's extremely hard to create a really good and preferable 
GUI. I'm struggling with Cocoa and Interface Builder on Mac OS X 
atm., and I haven't seen any glimpse of a 'perfect' GUI in that yet. 
If I was to design a GUI, I would go for simpleness, and still make 
sure, advanced users can make the advanced things.

Suggestion: If you have user-defined styles, then why not just go 
with a very basic set of styles to begin with, like only panel, group, 
etc. And then you could make an advanced version of the GUI (by including 
some script with styles), where you give users vpanel, vgroup, etc.

Result will be, new users don't read very much documentation and 
can start using the GUI very quickly. If you wanna do more advanced 
things, read the advanced docs, include the extra script and there 
you go.

That is possible, actually, having just the panel style, it is trivial 
to derive a vpanel style from it, since you have to only set the 
LAYOUT-MODE to 'VERTICAL, and that is all.

(the same holds for the vgroup style)

But, the concern here was to make the Layout dialect look "acceptable", 
which, for many people may mean many different alternatives.

And that's a problem with polls, you get many opinions. Better to 
set a strategy, define some good basic rules and make the thing without 
asking anybody. Keep K.I.S.S. in mind, as that's the most often (but 
yet very basic) rule broken.

A R2 GUI document, I've used a lot over the years, is:
http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-guide.html


About everything is there in a small space. It's a very good document 
to get you going, almost perfect. Maybe just a little too long still.

I find that if something should be decided, you should look at how 
easy it is to change the code based on that decision. The easier 
the code is to change, the later you can make the decision. This 
gives people a chance to test the GUI with that particular decision. 
In this case, we are working purely with style names, as far as I 
can see, which is possible to change in a few seconds, if we don't 
like them.

It is more of a problem in the documentation, there it surely takes 
more time.

And, it becomes a problem with existing code, since nobody wants 
to rewrite all the code he is using.

(by "existing code" I mean the code already using the affected styles)

Are there much R3 GUI code, that people actually use?