[Geany-devel] Change to the Documents Notebook

[Matthew Brush]

Hi,

I'm wondering about the possibility of adding an optional GtkNotebook to 
contain the documents widget.  I have a the geany-devhelp plugin doing 
this as well as the geany-glade plugin (not online yet) in order to keep 
some sanity in the user interface.  I also believe the WebHelper plugin 
could greatly benefit from this as well.  To get an idea of what I'm 
talking about, see this screenshot:

https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-devhelp/blob/master/geany-devhelp.png

You cannot see the Documents notebook in this screenshot, but it's under 
the "Code" tab at the bottom, just above the Message Window.  The 
Document notebook keeps it's tabs along the top while the new "Main" 
notebook puts its tabs on the bottom (it looked ugly with both on top).  
Some tab labels for this notebook that come to mind are Code(original 
Documents notebook with scintilla editors), Documentation(DevHelp), 
Design(Glade), Preview(WebHelper/WebKit), just to give some ideas.  If 
you explore the code in that project, you can see how I've implemented 
this, particularly that I've added some code to allow the new "Main" 
notebook come and go as the first and last plugin that needs it loads 
and unloads (since I needed this for the glade plugin as well as devhelp 
plugin).

The whole "Main" notebook being done from a plugin is pretty hackish, so 
I wanted to discuss the possibility of adding this into Geany itself and 
see what everyone though before I start hacking away for no reason (or 
if someone more skilled than myself would be willing to implement it).  
I don't think it would be terribly difficult to code this, but I'm 
certainly no expert.

I really think this would be great, but I think it should be optional, 
defaulted to be off, maybe under preferences dialog and/or activated by 
certain plugins.  This way those who want all of the integration 
possibilities of such plugins (and the overhead they bring) can have it 
and everyone else don't even need to care about it.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

P.S. Ignore the sidebar tab arrangement in the screenshot, I'm only 
referring to the "Main" notebook where the Documents notebook is (Code, 
Design tabs).

Cheers,
Matthew Brush (codebrainz)