Make the sidebar's view switching UX more conventional and less buggy (!37) · Merge requests · Graphics / Okular

Nate Graham requested to merge more-conventional-sidebar into master Sep 09, 2019

Okular's sidebar vertical view chooser toolbar has a few problems:

It's a nonstandard UI that most other document readers don't have
What is shown and what is hidden is simultaneously too configurable while still not offering the desirable UI common to other programs (i.e. no visible category chooser, but a sidebar capable of displaying thumbnails, table of contents, search results, etc.)
With labels on (by default) it takes up quite a bit of horizontal space, while with labels off, the categories are less than clear
UX is kind of clunky with nonstandard behaviors (e.g. clicking on the current category to hide that category's view while keeping the view chooser visible, showing mostly-disabled items)
By default it displays >22px size monochrome icons, which violates the HIG
It's made with custom painting code, which reduces maintainability and introduces bugs (e.g. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408190)

This patch removes the vertical category chooser entirely and replaces it with a combobox on the top of the sidebar view itself. A button is added to the default toolbar to quickly hide or show the sidebar. This improves the UX, fixes a variety of bugs, and deletes a lot of custom code of dubious long-term maintainability.

Okular_modernized_sidebar_demo