[Idle-dev] my work plans

[Mark Roseman]

> On Aug 14, 2015, at 7:48 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>>  * (patch done) centralize creation of ui components in a new ‘uifactory’ module. This is now used by about/prefs (#24760), and soon others. This module will also be in charge of choosing to use ‘ttk’ or ‘non-ttk’ based components (#24759)
> 
> Because menu creation is mostly 'data' driven, with a hierarchical structure, it will be relatively easy to collect and translate the strings in the menu ('File', 'Open', etc) for i18n without wrapping each literal string with _(...).  If other UIs were similarly data driven, rather than code-driven as now, i18n for other UIs would be similarly easy.  So I am curious as to your approach.

At this point it’s not about i18n or anything ambitious, just one place to centralize the “do I use classic- or ttk-flavoured versions of this dialog?” for large components, not individual widgets. Plus keeping track of these various non-editor windows, which becomes an issue as some of them change to modeless. So rather than an EditorWindow instantiating the preferences dialog directly, it would ask the uifactory to do so. While there will inevitably be a bit of that "call a method to call a method to call a method to… actually get work done", I’ll do my best to minimize that!

Moving to a central string table so the interface could be localized would be great. Later. ;-)


>   * menu handling, in particular enabling/disabling items according to app state (#24814 etc.)
> 
> I think most of the features currently implemented as 'optional extensions' should be incorporated as always present features and the disable option removed.  Their menu entries would then be moved into the main menudefs in bindings.py.  If it becomes easy to disable or even remove menu entries for disabled features, then we could move *all* main menu menudefs into bindings.menudefs.

I’m all for incorporating the optional extensions. By disabling here though I was referring to things like a ‘Copy’ menu item being disabled (inactive) if no text is selected in the active editor, etc.

Mark