Created attachment 2792 prototype of design Hello. Recently, he wrote to a mailing list about the idea of creating a program for xfce, which could help you move up to Linux and xfce in xfse in particular is very easy to configure xfce and its components and in general all the graphical environment as he wants. The program will be aimed mainly at newcomers to Linux or xfce. To my post attaching a screenshot of the prototype design. Design is not finished but that would let Th idea of technology and presentation elements of the program. Using the program is expected for 2 purposes: First is the function of xfce and the operating system for which there are no programs with a graphical shell and can be performed only in the terminal emulator, and the second is the empowerment of the package xfce-settings-manager Now a little about the design. As you can see in the main program is divided into 2 major parts. First - treeview, tree items - different areas of the settings. Second, the area on the right - the control center settings, the composition is determined by the selected item in the treeview. Also in the program will be a simple menu - File, close, about, help, and also to configure hot keys to control the program. p.s. At this stage of design is not much can be nice and tidy, because the first made as a prototype and its main aim is to give performance and conception of the future program, and secondly I am not a designer:) Then he must be more to artwork. Thank you.
Why couldn't this be implemented in the current xfce4-settings-manager? Make the rest of the dialogs embeddable, add an optional sidebar with a search field and a treeview (don't know if there's any way to categorise the dialogs currently but that could be fixed), and you're good to go. The settings dialogs for software like samba are outside the scope of core Xfce, and should probably be handled by the distributions leveraging Xfce. No reason these couldn't be plugged into Xfce4-settings-manager though. Plugins for common software like this would make great goodies.
Short comment from me: Tree views are a pain to navigate through and they are overkill for as few dialogs as we have. Actually, I think the current overview in the settings manager is pretty good already. We just need - a better way to embed the dialogs than we had before - reorganization and simplification of the dialogs (perhaps) and with simplification I don't mean to get rid of options. High configurability, even if not the best idea with regards to user-friendliness, is one of the strenghs of Xfce.
I understand you. Indeed most of the settings takes xfce manager but still I would like to help the project xfce.
I agree with Jannis the treeview won't bring a lot of improvement, but Kuleshov, you are always free to improve the current dialog. We always had the plan to support categories pointed out by Jari, but there is currently no widget in the gtk stack to do this properly, so that requires some custom stuff (see gnome-control-center). So Jannis' task to fix the embedding is a good one. Maybe a search/filter box would be nice, but there are not a *lot* of icons. For dialog simplification we might also take a look at the system wiki settings [1] to move some settings to more 'common' places. [1] http://wiki.xfce.org/dev/system-wide-settings
The treeview makes me feel like under KDE 3, and I really didn't like it. I like however the way it turns out in KDE 4. It's like the treeview, just that instead it exposes the categories in the whole window (a bit like the mcs/settings-manager). http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=kde4+systemsettings&simid=1620957397635 What makes such a window better is of course the search capability.
Something like this is not very hard to implement with some common gtk widgets and the ExoWrapTable.
(In reply to comment #5) > The treeview makes me feel like under KDE 3, and I really didn't like it. I > like however the way it turns out in KDE 4. It's like the treeview, just that > instead it exposes the categories in the whole window (a bit like the > mcs/settings-manager). the KDE4 control center is just a clone of the Mac OS X preferences window (and GNOME control center too).
4.10 has categories, so that's good enough for me.