Menu Buttons for PR Pane Conflict with Every Other Pan

[drguthals]

I recognize that the PR pane is GitHub, versus the others (home and changes in this example) are Team Explorer, however I have noticed a jarring experience when I'm going between PRs and Changes because there is no quick and easy way to get back to the Team Explorer home (where I then have access to the rest of my actions).

Team Explorer Home:

Changes:

I can get back to the Team Explorer home by clicking the Home icon.

PRs:

I can go back to the list view of PRs or open a browser window into GitHub, but I can't get back to the Team Explorer home. To get there, I have to go down to the bottom and click on the Team Explorer tab.

This may not be a major issue for most people, but Im' curious about the design decision here (i.e. not having a button up there to go home). I've found myself accidentally opening the GitHub browser window multiple times when trying to just get back to the Team Explorer Home pane.

Curious

[jcansdale]

Looking for a simple and pragmatic solution, I'd be inclined to add symmetrical buttons for navigation two and fro between Team Explorer and GitHub. They'd be the exact same buttons and commands as on the View menu. All they'd do is open their respective tools windows.

[donokuda]

@sguthals I wouldn't be surprised if the jarring experience is because the flows between Visual Studio Team Explorer and our extension is too integrated.

I don't have much insights to the design decisions. For what it's worth, we had a very light GitHub integration when I joined. For example, you didn't have the ability to view the details of a pull request. (Clicking on a PR would open it in a browser.)

I think there are a coupe of things that contribute to the issue here:

1. We're too integrated in the home screen of Team Explorer. Because Team Explorer tends to be the entry point to our extension (such as the Pull Request button on the home screen), our extension feels more like an extension to Team Explorer than on our own. Another example is that we show a "Welcome to GitHub for Visual Studio" banner inside of Team Explorer. When clicking around in Team Explorer, most actions tend to keep you inside of Team Explorer. I'm inclined to think that only actions around GitHub take you out of Team Explorer (and even then it's not clear that has happened.)
2. The navigation bar is too similar to Team Explorer. This mainly becomes an issue when users are directed to our panel from another panel (i.e., Team Explorer.) Because it's not obvious that a developer is in a different area of the app (or how they got there,) it's natural to go to the navigation bar to find their way back.

I'm hesitant to add a button that that takes you to Team Explorer from the GitHub panel because it makes us even more integrated into Team Explorer when I think we should be avoiding that. I think a GitHub Hub is our opportunity to address a lot of these issues.