[FusionDev] The Settings Manager Interface.

[Sam Spilsbury]

Hi

This discussion is NOT about settings backends the the method we use to
configure compiz. (Read, libcompiztutil vs libcompizconfig). This Discussion
is purely about the frontend of this, ALA CCSM. If you want to dicuss the
previous, please use the appropriate topic.

With that out of the way, I would like to raise a few points about CCSM.

Firstly the positives. It looks good already. The filter function is very
useful for finding options, although a bug regarding foucus needs to be
fixed. The way we switch backends and profiles is all good and does not need
fixing.

Now onto some regressions and suggestions.

The Main Page

      Screen Real-Estate.

Currently, CCSM seems to take up a lot of screen to be useful. The average
'use' is about three buttons in each row. To achieve that, CCSM takes up a
minimum of 960x520 pixels, which is about 2 thirds of my current
resoulution, which is 1280x800. The Major culprit here is the 'buttons.'
They take up WAYYYY to much space. The icons can be much smaller and the
icons and the text only take up about 3/5ths of the button, leaving 2/5ths
in wasted space. Is it possible to make these buttons smaller and therefore
the minimum window size smaller too?

      Old CSM like user interface.

Settings groups are not well presented. Instead, we just have a whole heap
of plugins dumped before the user on the main page. This becomes a problem
when there are over 61 different plugins at last count. What I suggest is
instead of having all the plugins sitting there on first open we have this :

                                                                  Compiz
Configuration
                Accessibility         Desktop          Effects
Extras       Window Management          Utility

The user selects the group they want to go to.
I also suggest 'view modes' such as 'view all plugins' 'Main Page 'Most used
options'

      Plugin Groups

In the original Beryl-Settings, we had about 8 plugin groups. In CCSM, we
have 9. We only need 6. Which are the ones in my mockup above. We don't need
a 'General Options' group as there is only one plugin in there and we don;t
need an 'Image Loaders' group because we don't even configure image loaders.
This brings me onto my next point

      Too many settings pages.

There are over 61 settings pages. We need to change that. My idea was that
instead of configuring stuff per-plugin, we configure it per-feature. For
example, the 'Desktop Cube Feature' encompasses

Cube (Duh)
Rotate
CubeRelfex
VPSwitch
MouseSwitch
Expo(?)
3D
Cube Gears
Viewport-Switcher (Racarr's planned plugin to have the wall 'switcher' in a
separate plugin)
Goto-Viewport

Desktop Wall :

Expo
Wall
Viewport-Switcher
Vpswitch
MouseSwitch
Goto-Viewport

Core :

Core
Regex
GLIB
iNotify
FUSE
DBUS
Scheme-Interpreter
Text
PNG
SVG
JPEG

Application Switcher :
Application Switcher
Ring Switcher
Flip3D (When it's made by defer (orig PlayerX)

Scale :
Scale
Scale Addons
Scale Title Filter

General Window Management :
Move
Resize
Resizinfo
WinRules
ExtraWM
Place
Put
Snap

Window Attributes :
Opacity (From Core), Brightness and Saturation
Negative
FakeARGB

I think that because global.xml overrides per-plugin stuff, we can do this
in Global.xml and maybe have different 'Global.xml' profiles.

Those are some suggestions for merged settings pages. Please comment on
them.

General Settings

Core plugin options need to be grouped. I can do this, I just need to know
how.

Keybindings and ScreenCorners

Beryl-Settings-Python used to have this. It was really useful. Can we have
it back :) ?



Sidebar :

     Screen
         Do we really need this section?

     Catergory : I'm sure with fewer catergories, we will have enough room
to make these bigger.

Other than that. Great work :). Keep it up :)
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