Idea: alternative widget using multiple buttons instead of a drop-down

[denilsonsa]

I got this idea from qddcswitch, please take a look at the screenshots over there.

The idea is to have an alternative implementation of non-continuous values. Instead of a drop-down selection box (that requires two clicks, and some precision), we could have multiple buttons side-by-side (requiring just one click). So, instead of this:

┌──────────────────┐   ┌──────────────────┐
│ VGA-1          ▼ │ → │ VGA-1          ▼ │
└──────────────────┘   └┬────────────────┬┘
                        │VGA-1           │
                        │DVI-1           │
                        │HDMI-1          │
                        └────────────────┘

We could have this:

┌────────┬────────┬────────┐
│ VGA-1  │ DVI-1  │ HDMI-1 │
└────────┴────────┴────────┘

This of course doesn't make sense if the amount of options is too high.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

Why a horizontal row instead of a vertical row? After all, that would be extensible since everyone's used to sidebars with scrollbars.

[digitaltrails]

Why a horizontal row instead of a vertical row? After all, that would be extensible since everyone's used to sidebars with scrollbars.

I may have considered it, I can't recall. Probably I went with horizontal because it's very easy to automate the layout. To do vertical sliders I would probably have to have code to place sliders vertically and then separately place combo boxes elsewhere. If I didn't separately place the combo-boxes, things could get very wide. At the moment the layout is a simple evenly spaced QVBoxLayout.

Just for fun, I just now flipped some of the layout settings to vertical. As you can see, a simple/single left-right layout for all the controls and labels isn't pretty, so moving to vertical sliders would require a more complicated set of layouts and layout algorithms:

Which is not to say it couldn't be done. But it's already 7000 lines of script.