waldo kitty schrieb:
MDI child windows MUST live inside the bounds of the Main Form!
That's a matter of taste, and I do not expect everybody to agree with my
viewpoint. MDI windows and menus are specific to the Windows platform,
so that other criteria must be found for other platforms.
FWIW: as David Noon pointed out, the definitive definitions are in the
books written by IBM and M$ when they developed and documented the MDI
and SDI interfaces back in the early days of OS/2 (at least) ;)
I've just re-read some old docs (Petzold), and found the same principles
for managing multiple documents all over. The keypoint is a single
*active* document, that acts upon menu and keyboard command. Whenever a
document of an different type becomes active, the application menu
should be updated accordingly. That flexibility is the major difference
between the old SDI and new MDI technology. The presentation itself is
less important to the implementation, be it in dedicated MDI child
windows, in "normal" (overlapped) windows, or in the tabs of a tabsheet.
WRT Lazarus, I have to start multiple instances when I want to see
multiple source units at the same time. This restriction brought me to
docking first, and now (finally) to the implementation of multiple edit
windows. I do not bother whether somebody calls it MDI or SDI, my only
desire are multiple edit windows in one process.
that's a fine goal and i, for one, look forward to seeing and using your
work in this aspect... i feel that it will be a big improvment to Laz's
IDE and will enable more productivity in the same way that multiple
document capabilities helped back in the days of Borland's Turbo and
Borland Pascal IDEs :)
Ah, I also remember those multiple source files in the old DOS IDE, long
before Windows took over.
DoDi
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