Settings rationalization

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hey Imre,

[I'm CC'ing Stephan, because he already started to work on implementing much of what you suggest here a while ago. Unfortunately it wasn't done by the time Xfce4.10 was released.]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2012 02:10:37 +0200
Benedek Imre <nucleo at indamail.hu> wrote:

> I've been looking at the Settings Manager and I've found there are quite a few illogical things - it could be better organised and rationalized.

+1

> 1. If I'd like to set something about appearance, I have to open 3(!) items: Appearance, Desktop and Window manager.

I'm not sure I fully agree. Although the desktop influences the "appearance", it is kinda different from the icons, gtk-themes and window-manager themes. Also: following your logic would also imply that the mouse-theme goes here and I'm not sure that'd be a good choice...
I mostly agree with the rest of the changes, especially having both gtk-theme and window-manager-theme in one tab could be useful.
Theoretically (some of) the desktop-settings could also go into the display-settings, especially setting the wallpaper (which would make setting different wallpapers for multiple displays more intuitive.

> 2. Window Manager has 2 Settings Manager items: 'Window Manager' and 'Window Manager Tweaks'. Personally I don't like Tweaks, just because it sounds a bit 'hacker' style. But it's not the point, it's more important that Window Manager and Tweaks has more tabs, which do not belong here I think. (Details later.)

+1 (although I don't care if "tweaks" sounds hacky, not even sure it does)

> 3. Keyboard and mouse: in conjunction with them there are more options which placed in 3(!) different places: 'Keyboard' and 'Mouse & Touchpad', 'Window Manager' (Window Shortcuts) and 'Removable Drives and Media' (Input Devices).

One problem of merging that is that the stuff from "Removable Drives and Media" comes from thunar-volman, but I guess that's still solvable. Other than that +1.

> 4. Workspaces: remember the content of Workspaces tab of 'Window Manager Tweaks' came here.
> I think it's unnecessary to use tabs in 'Preferred Applications' because those 4 settings can be placed together.
> See the mockups:
> http://ubuntuone.com/7C61jcllXeuSJZI0Cn7Cfs
> http://ubuntuone.com/1aDa57A5dGAgrV588FP0GV

Makes some sense, I guess. The "Preferred Apps" could get a more space-saving layout, then the 4 items wouldn't have to go into a grid, but a simple list.

> I think with these changes we could get a better organised, consequently built Settings Manager.
> Notice: I did not want to redesign, but only reorganise the Settings Manager.

Nice work! I'd wanna wait for Stephan's response, because I don't want to start a re-iteration of discussions that already went on in the xfce-development mailing-list, but that mailing-list would be the right place to post stuff like this. Generally speaking "we" (as in: the Xubuntu team) always try to fix things upstream instead of patching things ourselves (which results in a delta that we have to maintain by ourselves and less goodness for all other Xfce distros/users).
Let's hope we'll see this in Xfce 4.12 :)

Simon