[REQUEST] Slight behavior change regarding notifications and opening of output dock

[Gert-dev]

Hello

Since git-plus has updated to use the new docks API of Atom 1.17, I've been troubled by the automatic display of output a bit more than before. I think this is mostly since it now requires an extra click to close the dock, whilst previously the output pane would automatically disappear after a couple of seconds and was much smaller.

At the same time, I like that git-plus is now using an actual integrated dock that plays nicely with other packages instead of doing its own thing. Thus, I wanted to run an idea by you for a possible enhancement regarding dock and notification behavior.

Currently some actions display notifications for success and errors (checkout, push start, pull start, ...), whilst others use the bottom dock to display their output (merge, push complete, pull complete, ...). My idea is the following:

• All actions display (temporary, i.e. automatically disappearing) notifications (without output, of course, since output can be large). When you push, you first get the current notification Pushing... followed by a notification Push completed when its done. The same applies to pulling, merging, and so on.
• None of the current actions open the bottom dock automatically. The bottom dock is still filled with output as it was before (i.e. with the changes resulting from a merge or pull, the remote message of a push, ...).

Optionally the notifications can indicate that there is additional output to be found in the bottom dock.

The advantages of this approach would be that:

• Users that don't care about the actual output do not get the bottom dock thrown in their face whilst performing actions. They also don't need to actually click the button of the dock to dismiss the output they don't want to see.
• Users that only want to know if actions were completed or failed (push, pull) will get notifications to notify them of this and don't need to be distracted by or click to open the bottom dock to know what the result was.
• The bottom dock is still there in case you want more information, but it's more of a detailed log (optionally the bottom dock could become a scrolling/output log that maintains all output).

Thanks in advance

[akonwi]

Thanks for the suggestions. I want to eventually have all the commands that result in output to show in the dock view. A lot of this has been touched on in a way by another person in #547.

I'm hesitant about not opening the dock automatically to show output though. I'm sure if I did that there would be an issue about how there's no output anymore or the inconvenience of having to manually open the dock to see it. Perhaps, disabling the automatic opening can be an opt-in setting. I'll just note though that the dock will only open automatically for the first command that needs it because I intentionally don't initialize the output view on startup just in case there's no other app in that space. After that, if the dock is closed, then subsequent updates to the view won't open the dock.

I'm really stoked about that output view being more like a readonly log of actions done with this package. Unfortunately, I just haven't been able to make it happen yet.

[carlhopf]

first off thanks for the great plugin!

just wanted to say that Gert-dev's ideas regarding the notifications are great. this would save a lot time opening/closing the dock (personally i prefer to keep it closed)