[Qt-creator] Project explorer (was Re: Annoyance with 4.11)

[Christian Gagneraud]

On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 at 01:03, Tobias Hunger <Tobias.Hunger at qt.io> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2020-02-20 at 22:45 +1300, Christian Gagneraud wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > The project explorer is a GUI component that assists the user with
> > graphically exploring a project.
>
> Actually the project view is meant to show what the build system thinks your
> project is. Such a view is necessary to allow for UI operations to manipulate
> the project.

I guess the problem comes from the convention we use, 1 build target
per directory/CMake file, hence why i have this feeling of un-needed
nesting.
A sub-dir = a project = a build target. but i get 3 nested nodes out
of that. It's logical on one hand, but feels overloaded on the other
hand.

Then there's the 'simplified' option, interesting at first, except
that it doesn't scale with big projects, I think it's flatten too
much, it starts with all the CMakefiles, i have over 100. And then the
build targets (which is good), but then it's followed by a massive
list of 'loose' headers. Which I think are headers used by the code,
but not mentioned in any CMake files. I really don't know how this
list is computed, on another (small) project, i have all QtSerialBus
related headers, including examples?!? I just discovered that these
files go away with the 'hide disabled files'.
Another thing i don't like, is that the list of source files
associated to a target is completely flatten, which is annoying when a
build target has a lot of files, organised in sub-directories, you
loose this natural grouping property.

My preference for the simplified view, would be to not show the build
files, and provide a list of build target at level1 (as currently
done), each expanding into a source tree that follows the storage
structure. And no extra loose files at the end.
that would be both simple and usable (in my case).

I would use this simplified view when i 'write code', and use the full
view when i work on the build system files.
When you think about it, generally developers don't care about the
build system files, they just want to add a class here and there and
use it somewhere else.

And there's a third use-case i think, which is the code review mode,
but in that mode, locator and code navigation shortcuts are king, so i
don't need the explorer much.

Hum... I'm sure someone already came with the idea of code review from
within QtC...

My 2 cents.