Option to have the tag treeview with "constant" sizing in the tags

[diego]

I would like to disable the feature in which the tag size (in the top-left treeview) depends on the amount of documents, i would like all the characters to be the same size.

[huang (zwhuang)]

It a good idea to disable this feature. Characters of different sizes look a little uncomfortable.
Actually, you can introduce *color* to tag names. For example,
RED: 100+
YELLOW: 50+
... ...

[Jochen Martin Eppler (jochen-eppler)]

The attached patch provides a fix for this. I tried to respect the prevalent coding styles as good as possible.

Roughly the patch does the following:
  * Make all tags the same size
  * Tags that have no documents are grayed out
     * All other tags are displayed in the format "tagname (tagusecount)"
  * Add a separator that divides 'All' and 'Untagged' from the rest of the tags

The patch also fixes several minor issues:
  * After renaming, tags are only marked as dirty if oldname != newname
  * Make the 'All' and 'Untagged' tags immutable

[John S (jcspray)]

Jochen:
I'm not prepared to simply rip out the variable sizing. Making it an option would reasonable, with a checkbox either in a view menu or in the preferences dialog. The rest of the stuff in your patch looks good, aside from the left-aligning which again is a matter of taste.

The sizing/alignment should really be a separate patch from the other less contentious stuff. If you separate it out then I'll commit the less contentious stuff.

I'm not particularly in love with the current tagging UI, and I'm more interested in a redesign of it than I am in tweaking it to one or another person's taste. Get in touch if you want to do any more in-depth work on the tagging UI and I'll draft a blueprint.

[Jochen Martin Eppler (jochen-eppler)]

I thought about your suggestions and decided to resubmit my patch with the suggested modifications.
Would it be OK if I
  * add a new tab "General" to the preferences dialog
  * add a frame "Tag Pane" to this tab
  * add checkboxes "Display number of tagged documents"
    and "Tag font size reflects number of tagged documents" to this frames?

Should I also add the posibility to set the alignment of the tags?

[John S (jcspray)]

On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 20:08 +0000, Jochen Martin Eppler wrote:
> I thought about your suggestions and decided to resubmit my patch with the suggested modifications.
> Would it be OK if I
> * add a new tab "General" to the preferences dialog
> * add a frame "Tag Pane" to this tab
> * add checkboxes "Display number of tagged documents"
> and "Tag font size reflects number of tagged documents" to this frames?

Warning: I do not want to disappoint you later by ripping out this as
the tag UI changes in other ways. For instance, if the list is replaced
by a tag cloud (such as the widget in paperbox[1]), then the option to
turn off variable sizing becomes less relevant.

I would say you can do this if you want, but be aware that the tag UI
could change sufficiently to make these settings redundant in the
future. If you do decide to go ahead then the tab should be called
"User interface", and the checkboxes should go under a heading called
"Tagging".

John

1. I've actually done a very basic version of integrating that widget
into referencer on my local branch.