Re: [lmi] [lmi-commits] master fb91253 12/13: Revert "Store the last selected page of MvcController persistently"

[Greg Chicares]

On 2018-05-09 00:14, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Tue,  8 May 2018 19:51:07 -0400 (EDT) Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> GC>     Revert "Store the last selected page of MvcController persistently"
> GC>     
> GC>     This reverts commit e4f1a40cf81bcb9ca65777cb193e198582229cf3. It was
> GC>     worth experimenting with the "persistent" behavior, but the original
> GC>     behavior is preferred.
> 
>  Out of curiosity, what was the problem with the "persistent" behaviour?

There are two use cases when you run lmi:

(1) You want to go back to whatever you were doing before you closed lmi.
But in that case you really wouldn't have closed it.

(2) You want to do something different. In this case, teleporting to the
tab you were working on last is disorienting: you probably want to start
at the first tab.

(1) doesn't really occur in practice, so (2) governs.

Suppose you're using a word processor. When you closed it, you were editing
page eleven of the last document you worked on. Now you open a new document;
do you want to go to its eleventh page? No, not unless you open the same
document again. IOW, persistent bookmarking should be document-specific,
ideally: opening the same multiple_cell_document would highlight the last
cell you were working on, and the last dialog tab you viewed, and maybe
even the last control that was focused on that tab. It can't be done at the
wx level, and we won't do it at the lmi level because it's too much work
for too little benefit.

It was kind of nice to have a persistent tab selection in the "Properties"
dialog, which of course is document-independent. But probably that was
really useful only to the select few who subscribe to this mailing list.
In a word processor, that's parallel to, say, remembering the last custom
color you had selected for highlighting. Dialogs in a word processor are
for settings like that, which are global or at least potentially global.
For lmi, OTOH, what's shown in those ten-tab dialogs isn't settings: it's
*content*.

It's a nice feature for wx to offer. It just didn't fit lmi.