the current experience of opening projects is terrible.
I'm *not* saying the current experience is great/can't be improved. The issue is that Geany currently allows new-project workflows that this PR completely eliminates. I've made suggestions that would avoid that problem.
it's a necessity if you want to set the other 2 values correctly.
Setting project basepath first is not a "necessity".
* Geany currently allows the fields to be completed in any order. * The project name and base path can be changed independently from Project Preferences (showing that they are not related). * The file can be located anywhere, moved in a file manager, symlinked, whatever, like any other file, independently of the project base path.
But again, this is how other editors work...
Other editors doing things a certain way doesn't mean Geany must also. Geany does lots of things differently from other editors. If other editors are so great, why use Geany in the first place?
what people in #2245 suggested - open project as if it were a directory.
#2245 (and #1171) suggest opening folders as if they were projects. This PR is not close to doing that. For instance, what happens if a user drag/drops a folder into Geany? What happens if a user runs `geany /path/to/folder/`? These could be implemented without touching the New Project workflow.
If you press cancel in the first dialog or select a whatever directory, you can customize everything in the second dialog.
That is not obvious at all. Cancel usually aborts a process entirely. So another strike against this PR. Users who start the new project creation process have to cancel twice to truly cancel the process.
What (technically) prevents this PR from being implemented as a plugin?
Geany API doesn't contain a function to open project and I don't think this function should be added.
Why not? It could be useful for some project-based plugin, like Workbench.
Open project properties in the last step is just a convenience thing I added but I don't find essential and can be dropped if disliked by others. If desired, I could leave "Project->New.." as it behaves now and add "Project->New from folder..." with this new behavior.
New menu item (*Project / New from folder...*) plus no second dialog after folder selection is preferable to the implementation of this PR.