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Sometimes I became crazy when eg. I'm writing a comment message to the commit command and I can't look into my sources, for details which I'd like to mentioned. BECAUSE those dialogs are MODAL:-((( I'm force to start using other tool to browse my sources and looking for some code/method/objects/variables to mentioned them in my comments. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I know you'll start to opposite that user will hide this dialog under other windows, etc... Simply I wanna see such kind of humman beeing who is able to writing code and it's not able to look after its windows... such user wouldn't be able neither to write any code (so in this case ITS won't probably need IDE) nor while its dislike windows... its used to keep writing its code in cmdline tools/consoles/terminals ... but its will have opened lots of those cmdlines windows... -------------------------------------------------------------------- To have MODELESS dialogs could be done in a few various ways: 1) The ideal one: To keep the ide "restriction" idea (to keep itselfs against "not clever" users, or users misstakes...) We could have an option for that as we have an option for "Advanced commands" dialogs, like "Very advanced Developer/CVS mode" which will popup Commands dialogs. But those dialogs won't be MODAL and user has to look after them and it will be his/her dangerous s/he will invoke another one for the same commit ofer same files. But still, Having 10 CVS Commit dialogs opened...doesn't meen that we have necessary problems. Only one of them could be executed and others will failed (or of commit is FORCED...they commit an empty revisions....so no problem)... Here I try to equalese it to a situation when we will force user to edit more files at once or even we will worce to user save edited those files, because we are aware to s/he wouldn't save NONSENCE in his/her files... The same is valid for others commands... Eg. Add will failure.. etc. 2) Other varianty could be have only MODELESS dialogs... But from the point of UI thinking as it is know....users( I will reduce them only to NOVICEs with netbeans ide) might have problems with this... 3) Have an option on each dialog to change mode:-) Do't know if it is technicaly possible. But if we release such dialog, there must be an EASY way to bring it back... (by invoking the same command? or by clicking in MainFrame,like it behaves NOW when you using SDI mode, and hide this dialog with eg.Editor? or by Better orginizing "Window" menu...Which always has have an idea which windows are opened and not to ignore some type of Error/Exception/Notifiing dialogs) 4) some kinda mixture of variants above.... Any comments?
I agree, that this is a problem, which needs to be solved. It's really annoying when you can not look at the sources or make diffs while writting comments into the commit dialog. This can be solved by using groups and filling group description, but that requires additional organization of files, knowledge of the IDE and extra time. To the solution: I'm not sure which solution is the best and we will need some help from UI team for sure. It's apparent, that the solution must be to make the commit dialog non-modal. This brings several problems: (a) do all dialogs modal by default or let the user a possibility to decide? (b) When the dialog goes behind another window, how to get it back? (c) When the user run the commit again, what to do with the old dialog? Problem in (a) has several solutions as proposed by Dan: (1) - IMHO a good solution. Not much intuitive for beginners, there's a possibility, that the user will never find this option. But we can mention this mode in the initial message that JavaCVS uses to inform users about the advanced mode. (2) - We should be able to resolve problems, that can be caused by this solution anyway. Solution (1) gives a choice to the user, which is nice. (3) - This is technically possible. Dialog.setMode(true/false). However I'm not sure it will work correctly with all window managers, it would needd to be properly tested. It's quite non-standard (I've never seen this in another application). But the non-modal dialogs are probably needed most for commit. You can live with modal dialogs for most of the time. IMHO this is the best solution regarding to functionality, but I'm not sure about usability and ui-style consequences. I propose to solve problems mentined in (b) and (c) as follows: (b) - The Window -> Windows menu could contain the list of all opened Modes and Dialogs. The user can also find the dialog herself with the help of the OS window manager. (c) - If the new commit will be on the same set of files as the old commit, move focus to the old commit window instead of creating a new one. If the new commit will be on a different set of files, create a new dialog for it and do not make any changes to the old dialog. However it would be polite to inform the user, then there already exist a commit dialog, mainly if the two sets of files for the two commit dialogs have a non-empty intersection. Filip, can you please comment on this from the UI point of view?
Well, Filip pointed out, that this is getting quite complicated. The problem with commit can be solved by issue #22847. Thus I propose to resolve this as a duplicate of issue #22847 and increase the priority of issue #22847. Dan, if you have some comments, add them to issue #22847 or reopen this if you disagree. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 22847 ***
Well, I'm not quite happy with this... But originaly this issue exist because of MODAL Commit dialog and for others I didn't found so strong feeling to enter an issue;-)