"Inspector" UI concept

Improvement Ideas
1

Many graphical editing tools utilize an “inspector” (to use MacOS nomenclature) model for the UI which places one or more contextual, non-modal properties editors off to the side of the window or in a separate floating window. People seem to have strong opinions about modal vs. non-modal editing, to the point where Altium seems to have been forced by their users to preserve both schemes when they introduced inspectors in their major rewrite. However, I would really appreciate seeing inspectors coming to LibrePCB for the following reasons:

  • More ready access to and/or contextual awareness of design parameters, instead of needing to dig through various menus to actively inspect design parameters
  • Editing multiple things at a time (e.g. Library editor: place and size multiple items simultaneously · Issue #1169 · LibrePCB/LibrePCB · GitHub) while also maintaining the ability to move them around
  • Keystroke reduction (no explicit action to open an property editor)
  • The same spatial location is used for editing all types of properties, helping to reinforce muscle memories, instead of being scattered in different types of UIs in different locations

Multi-editing itself could be implemented without inspectors, but having to summon a modal context to edit blocks some visual feedback useful for interactive editing like selecting multiple components filtering properties to a common subset.

At its most basic level, an inspector could display properties of the document if nothing is selected. If something is selected, additional options would appear depending on the object type(s). This can be arranged hierarchically (e.g. many Mac apps with tabbed inspectors, one tab for each level of hierarchy like document | sheet | component | pin) or in many separate panes with selectable visibility (like Photoshop or many other “pro” type applications).

I believe the same needed UI elements could largely be arranged in either container, but having the hierarchy of property editors would make more sense to exist as an always-visible inspector pane, I think.

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Thanks for the suggestion :+1: Actually I already have this in mind for quite some time to get rid of modal dialogs and to enable very powerful multi-editing. See my (very provisional) mockup here.

So I’m pretty sure this will come, it’s just a matter of time.

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