Jump to content
Plastic SCM forums are now in Unity. Click here to open the new forum ×

Please bring back the workspace tabs

applenaut

By applenaut
in General

 Share

Recommended Posts

applenaut Newbie

applenaut

Posted
Posted

I'm a fan of Plastic. From the GUI to the feature sets, I think it's near perfect.

However, I'm disappointed at the recent GUI changes to the Plastic SCM client. The quick-switch workspace tabs are now replaced with a drop down menu (top left corner).

For a studio that have multiple projects running concurrently, this takes one more click to switch workspaces. Not a big deal at a glance...until you find yourself having to switch back and forth often as the project manager.

Please consider bringing back the tabs. I don't see a reason for changing the GUI for this just to sacrifice fewer clicks for a few more pixels of screen estate.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
psantosl Newbie

psantosl

Posted
Posted

Hi applenaut,

 

Thanks for your suggestion.

 

Unfortunately, we didn't get this feedback from other users, which seem to be happy with the changes in 6.0, so I'm afraid we won't be able to customize the behavior this time.

 

Our goal was initially to move into something like what we have in Mac and Linux, with a switcher and workspace windows. We wanted to associate the window to a workspace, not many, and isolate the repos and workspaces view, which seem like they don't really match inside a given workspace. For instance, typically Plastic on Windows can't start up if you don't have a workspace (in fact, it forces you to create one) while Linux/OS X let you start and then decide if you want to browse repos, create more, go to workspaces, etc.

 

But, then we decided something more compact would do better on Windows. And that's how the "breadcrumb like" style showed up. It also allowed us to gain more vertical space, removing one row completely, which is always a good thing.

 

So, I'm sorry to hear you did not like the changes, and we will listen carefully about what others have to say about this, and we'll react accordingly.

 

Thanks!

 

pablo

Link to comment
Share on other sites
applenaut Newbie

applenaut

Posted
  • Author
Posted
9 hours ago, psantosl said:

Hi applenaut,

 

Thanks for your suggestion.

 

Unfortunately, we didn't get this feedback from other users, which seem to be happy with the changes in 6.0, so I'm afraid we won't be able to customize the behavior this time.

 

Our goal was initially to move into something like what we have in Mac and Linux, with a switcher and workspace windows. We wanted to associate the window to a workspace, not many, and isolate the repos and workspaces view, which seem like they don't really match inside a given workspace. For instance, typically Plastic on Windows can't start up if you don't have a workspace (in fact, it forces you to create one) while Linux/OS X let you start and then decide if you want to browse repos, create more, go to workspaces, etc.

 

But, then we decided something more compact would do better on Windows. And that's how the "breadcrumb like" style showed up. It also allowed us to gain more vertical space, removing one row completely, which is always a good thing.

This change is new so I would wait for more feedback to come in. I didn't even know my client was out of date until I had to do a fresh uninstall. So, people may simply not have the chance to update to this version yet.

I think most users are used to having tabs. It's what the software industry landed on as good design. Look at browsers and IDEs for instance. You don't see people wanting to use dropdown menus as a way to navigate through tabs. That would be an ordeal, and that's what I'm experiencing.

I understand why you did what you did but I disagree with the benefit outweighing the 2x the amount of mouse clicks in order to change workspaces. Please consider the scenario above: How would it feel to replace tabs in web browsers with a dropdown menu?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
wnicholls Newbie

wnicholls

Posted
Posted

Tabs are a well-understood concept - but NESTED tabs?  Having two different widgets for two different purposes helps separate them.

Everyone's use case is going to be different but personally I am comfortable with the 6.0 drop down. 

On the other hand, I've found the way global views - workspaces, repositories - mix in with the things like 'items in workspace' , to be really stupid:

This clutters up the workspace view for starters, and with multiple workspaces they get lost.  The obvious way is for this to be some kind of "Global views" set of tabs.  Not sure if that will be significantly more usable - don't just take my opinion.  In some respects they are really singleton views - why have more than one open?  - and should behave  like Preferences does - I mean here not so much the popup window, but that clicking on "Workspaces" in the sidebar would bring up THE workspaces view.   Of course, other people might like to have multiple views with different filters set. Not that you can really do that successfully now.

Selection_1101.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Misieq Newbie

Misieq

Posted
Posted
On ‎2017‎-‎08‎-‎11 at 6:55 PM, applenaut said:

Do you mind explaining why the tab system is more convenient? 

You meant "drop-down" system, didn't you?

As I wrote - I am opting for current approach (drop-down) instead of tabs.

The reason is that for configurations with a lot of workspaces - tabs are so small that it is difficult to see their names. So to select proper workspace it requires to each time go into "Repositories&Workspace" menu.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
psantosl Newbie

psantosl

Posted
Posted

Hey guys,

 

Thanks for the extra info.

 

@wnicholls nested tabs is what we are trying to get rid of. Not anymore on our Linux/OS X UIs. Not in 6.0 now that the main tab is not there either.

 

@Misieq not that this is what I stick to, but other version control UIs (quite widely adopted) don't use tabs either. I find them fine on browsers but... are they the same thing.

 

Happy to discuss this with you guys, and open to make changes :-) 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 5 weeks later...
  • 7 months later...
khashfirestorm Newbie

khashfirestorm

Posted
Posted

My team loved tabs as this made it 
A) easier to notice when you are on wrong workspace (we have 2-3 branches each, one for WIP, one for experiments and one from which master branch can pull safe changes)
From the moment tabs were taken away from us it keeps getting annoying that we think we are on different branch than we actually are

B) merging and switching between branches is slower as we have to look into the list of the workspaces and workspaces flip their positions there (so for example I have 3 my regular worksapces and 3-4 other worksapces for things I rarely do , I do not care how those other workspaces are accessed but my main branches flip like mad their order which I could control before on tabs)

We loved previous design, we do not like new. It does not take greatness of the Plastic, but it is a stain all right.

Ability to have previous tabs back instead of dropdown (even if this have to be manually turned on in preferences) would be amazing.
Thank you

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 1 year later...
Tobias Newbie

Tobias

Posted
Posted
On 8/11/2017 at 8:59 AM, Misieq said:

From my perspective current solution is better - tabs worked fine but up to just few workspaces...

I have currently 20 workspaces and drop-down is much more convenient.

May I ask if you see all workspaces in the drop-down list?

Mine is limited to 7 entries, but I have 12+ workspaces ☹️

Is there a way to increase that number?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...