[RFC] git-gui window layout

Dear Giters,

I would like you to comment on my idea to change, or at least add a possibility to change, the current layout of git-gui window.

Nowadays there is a tendency to produce wide screens for laptops and even standalone LCD monitors. One can safely assume that the minimum reasonable horizontal resolution of a screen is at least 1024 pixels (I do not expect anyone using git-gui with 800x600 resolution). Moreover, most popular window managers decreases the vertical dimension of a desktop by using horizontally-oriented panels (e.g. KDE, Gnome, XFCE4, etc.)

The current layout of git-gui window covering the whole desktop area on a typical WXGA (1280x800) laptop LCD display is thus:

+----------+-----------------------------------+
|          |                                   |
|  staged  |          unstaged                 |
|          |                                   |
+----------+----------------+------------------+
|###     commit log         |      EMPTY       |
|###                        |                  |
+---------------------------+------------------+
|                                              |
|    diff output                               |
|                                              |
+----------------------------------------------+

In my opinion, the staged, unstaged and diff areas are usually used for displaying things that are taller than wider (e.g. a list of files, patches of well structured code, which is usually < 80 columns). The commit log window is also designed for text narrower than < 80 cols.

Therefore in my opinion it might be more useful to restructure this layout to something like this:

+-------------+----------------------------+---+
|             |                            |###|
|             |       commit log           |###|
|   staged    +----------------------------+---+
|             |                                |
|             |                                |
+----- 1 -----+                                |
|             |       diff output              |
|             2                                |
|  unstaged   |                                |
|             |                                |
|             |                                |
+-------------+--------------------------------+

Buttons (rescan, push, commit, etc.) are denoted here as ###. Besides the walls denoted as 1 and 2 should be movable so one could adjust the size of staged/unstaged and diff areas. The minimum width of diff window would be limited by the commit log window width (I propose 80 colums) plus the size of the buttons.

Unfortunately, I do not nothing about TCL/TK programming, so I even did not tried to analyse the code of git-gui. Therefore I am not sure if such a restructure is easy to implement.

Anyway I hope for your comments to this idea.

BR, /Adam

Adam Piatyszek schrieb:

May I point you to http://repo.or.cz/w/git-gui.git?a=commitdiff;h=a0592d3f5746b41c60fee71dd8d2d27b5c813907 which was committed 5 hours ago.

Except that it has Unstaged above Staged and Diff above Commit, which IMHO is much more natural.

-- Hannes

* Johannes Sixt [2007-10-12 12:00]:

Thanks for the info! It seems that I was a bit late with my proposal. ;-)

/Adam