feature request - minimize a leaf to a side-bar

[friendlyOtter333]

It would be nice to have a minimize-icon next to the menu of the Leaf.

Clicking on the minimize icon would:

• hide the leaf and all its dockables completely
• add an icon to a side-bar, representing the leaf

The side-bar would only be visible when 1 or more Leafs are minimized.
Clicking on the leaf-icon on the side-bar would restore the Leaf to its former state.

[Col-E]

Some questions:

1. How do you know which side bar (top, bottom, left, right) will receive the leaf when minimized?
2. When unminimizing from the side bar, how does the leaf know where to go?
   • Say the leaf belonged to some branch that eventually got pruned with additional user interactions. How do we restore it to its "former state"?
3. The icon on the side bar would represent a whole leaf, which encompasses several dockables. If you minimized multiple leaves into the same side bar how would you differentiate them?
   • Since you mentioned Eclipse, it looks like it shows a list of all icons of the minimized leaves (so tools like breakpoints, vs open source files are easily differentiable)

[friendlyOtter333]

1 - there can only be one :-) can be programmatically chosen at startup of the program. let's say right by default.
(maybe the side bar can be dragged to left, top or bottom afterward) My inspiration is Eclipse IDE :-)

2 - very good question. The information where to visualize a Leaf can be in the structure of the root and branches network. (if it is not already. sorry i did not analyse the source code of Bento yet). That structure could stay untouched regardless of the state of its Leafs. (minimized|maximized|normal) When some Leafs are minimized they just don't take up space and the the closest neighbouring Leaf could take up the gained space to get optimum photosynthesis.
A pruned Branch is destroyed and can not get resurrected, all of it's Leafs die. User actions may regrow a branch in the same place and regrow Leafs on that Branch by re-adding Dockables. (In Eclipse there is the menu : Window / Show View / )

3 - i have no preference. Indeed in Eclipse in the side-bar, a Leaf is visualized as a separator resembling"...." with underneath it a restore-icon and underneath that, an icon for each Dockable that is part of that Leaf. It is nice, but on the other hand the list of Dockables could outgrow the space of the side-bar. Each Dockable has a disitnct icon and mouse-hover-title.
If you don't visualize the Dockables in the side-bar then the Leafs could be represented by a distinct icon and mouse-hover-title?

[Col-E]

The information where to visualize a Leaf can be in the structure of the root and branches network

Currently the node hierarchy in the scene graph is largely how that is determined. The branch containers hold leaf containers. And the leaves hold the dockables. There isn't a strict layout model that is then mapped to controls.

It would probably make sense to introduce such a model and then refactor how the controls interact with said model before working on a minimize/maximize feature. That would probably have some significant implications for #13 which I'm aware is being worked on. Maybe once that gets done I can take do some refactoring. Stuff like this is why the version is still 0.X - I've been pretty sure over time there'd be the need for some larger breaking changes 😂