Window Splitting Feature?

[chrooted-mother]

I use Hexchat on my Windows OS and it's lovely, my favorite irc client. There's one thing I really miss though when I'm using it instead of weechat though. Window Splitting. I'm not sure how hard it would be to add this feature but I'd really love if you could add it.

Possibly set it up so you can have multiple pages of split windows so you can have like Page 1 with your channels in Server A, Page 2 with channels in Server B? Just having something like weechat or irssi would still make me very happy though.

Thanks!

[Joah]

To add onto this, it'd be very cool if windowing like mIRC could be added to HexChat as well. I've been using XChat since 2010 and HexChat since it changed names from XChat-WDK; the only thing I dislike about both is their lack of mIRC-style windowing. Adding this would make HexChat more attractive to mIRC users, as well, in my opinion.

[debian07]

mIRC or kVIRC windowing could we awesome. One of the reasons because my friends prefer mIRC over xchat is the lack of this feature, because in mIRC or kvirc you can read in a proper maner more than one channel at time, without alt tabing.

[TingPing]

Not the ideal solution but you can just detach a channel and place the windows next to each other.

[debian07]

The problem with detach is that your taskbar is full of xchat windows, and is hard to organize them.

[ducka]

1+ for this feature.

[flomax]

This would pretty much perfect this already awesome client. 👍 to implement this.

[sashaacker]

MDI windows would be awesome. What help would you need to implement them?

[Arnavion]

@sashaacker All of it.

[jad340]

Agreed

[Carl20]

I've tried HexChat and it's an amazing client, very intuitive and it has some really nice features. The fact that it doesn't have Window Splitting however is the single reason why I haven't moved over from mIRC yet. This would definitely be a great feature to have.

[Poorchop]

If MDI windows were implemented, does that mean we would get title bars and overlapping channels all over the place? I really hate that about mIRC, but something like pane splitting as in tmux and weechat would be amazing.

[gdude2002]

Just putting my vote in for this. I'm getting tired of mIRC and HexChat seems like a fantastic client, but I simply can't use IRC efficiently without my subwindows.

...does that mean we would get title bars and overlapping channels all over the place?

mIRC has tiling options and stuff, you can easily make them tile automatically.

[Poorchop]

With all due respect, that UI looks awful and there is so much wasted space, which is why pane splitting would be much better. Only a single input bar is needed, as well as a single user list that changes based on the active context. As mentioned above, you can get that exact same layout in your picture if you just detach channels from the initial HexChat window and tile them yourself.

[gdude2002]

...you can get that exact same layout in your picture if you just detach channels from the initial HexChat window and tile them yourself

No, these are MDI windows - they tile automatically in mIRC, and are contained within one main window that I can simply leave maximized on its own screen. Split windows are extremely painful to manage.

...that UI looks awful and there is so much wasted space

Agreed. But no more wasted space than actual separate windows.

[Corrodias]

Indeed. It would be preferable to have the option to make the child windows titleless or even borderless, but failing that, it's still better than separate windows because you can have the common toolbar elements and whatnot in the main window.

[circuit-breaker]

Asking the user to approximate this via stripping the window borders & arranging an arbitrary # of detached channel windows into a grid is a bit much, don't you think? Not trying to be confrontational, just think it's very impractical, and far out of reach for a lot of users.

This could be solved with tiling, not MDI. Some modern X terminals do this exact thing: Terminator & Terminix. MDI allowed for the free movement & arrangement of windows that only existed within the boundaries of the parent window. You could place them wherever, and they could have gaps between them, wasting precious (in this case) space. Hexchat could benefit from tiles however.. tiles with adjustable boundaries by dragging the divider bars between them.

Take a look at either X terminal I mentioned to see what I mean. They do exactly as I describe above and are quite useful instead of managing individual windows. They are both GTK, just via different bindings.

[gdude2002]

As far as I know, GTK does not support MDI windows.
On 18 May 2016 06:38, "circuit_breaker" notifications@github.com wrote:

I know MDI is the 'red-headed stepchild' of the widget/UI toolkit world,
but this is the sole use case I can think where I actually WANT it. It
serves a very functional purpose in this specific case, that otherwise must
be handled outside the client. Unless that's done right, it'll be quite
awkward to manage for those of us with lots of channels to tile, remove
borders from.. and that's for a static view.

MDI still haunts us via Office (that's the one I know of) so let's at
least use it to our advantage, maybe?

Does the GTK toolkit support such a thing?

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#34 (comment)

[gdude2002]

Ah, looks like you edited your comment. Well..

---

Tiling is not a full solution to this issue. It's definitely something that should be included, though - see this gif for what mIRC does.

Full image link

As you can see, this is more than just tiling - you can maximize windows or hide them at your leisure. Additionally, if you don't want to tile, you don't have to - you can arrange the windows any way you please. If it's possible to do this, then I feel like we should default to preferring it, as it is nowhere near as limited as simple tiling with borders.

Additionally, Hexchat doesn't appear to support hiding the treebar (list of channels to the left), so that support would need to exist for the tiling setup.

[circuit-breaker]

Thanks for the reply, and sorry for the ninja edit.. :) I just had realized what I liked and felt worked w/the terminal examples

[Corrodias]

This is the reason I still use mIRC instead of anything else. I'm just glad it's back under development and is adding IRCv3 features, so it plays nicely with ZNC's server timestamps.

I'm under no illusion that adding such a feature to HexChat -- or to any other client not designed for it -- would be easy. I wouldn't even entirely appreciate it using MDI, even were it viable in a cross-platform program, because I'm not a fan of the full-sized window titlebars mIRC uses taking up space, nor am I fond of the powder blue color they're limited to because of Windows 7's "basic" color scheme (unless you patch a DLL and use a third party visual style). Some kind of heavily customized UI that looks like a web app, such as is used by the likes of Discord, Slack, and HipChat, seems like the most likely approach these days, doesn't it?

In any case, if HexChat could solve this, I'd probably love it as a client. As it is, to keep an eye on all my channels and easily move the entire group of them between monitors, mIRC seems like my best option. However, I understand KVIrc was updated recently to use italics like everyone else, so I should give it another look.

[gdude2002]

Unfortunately I doubt it'll happen. To my knowledge, GTK still doesn't support what would be required - and with the way that project is going, it probably never will.

[Corrodias]

It turns out KVIrc removed MDI and can no longer do this. mIRC is now the only client with this capability.

[circuit-breaker]

GTK2 had some MDI functionality, but it appears GTK3 has less.. I could be wrong but a cursory search didn't look hopeful. This increasingly looks like a pipe dream, however ill-advised MDI has been, we were willing to make concessions for this highly important use-case.. but no matter how much we just have to have our single window with tiled irc channels, it's not reasonable to expect the ever shrinking surface area of the GTK API to cater to our corner case with a UI concept experts considered deficient decades(?) ago. Should this be closed then?

[Corrodias]

Understood, and I can't blame the team for prioritizing as it has. I don't necessarily want MDI - in fact I don't particularly like how it looks - however, it's clearly possible to create different... panels/frames, as KVIrc has channel list, the channel content, the name list, and so on. Is it conceivable that, some time in the future, it could display more than one channel in a grid layout using those mechanisms instead?

At present, my unrealistic dream is that someone makes an HTML/JS-based client that renders its own, movable windows inside, but an implementation of a new IRC client from the ground up, with such an esoteric feature, isn't likely to happen.

[circuit-breaker]

I think you're entirely right that that is how it will have to be done- and I hope it also displays image media inline... that'd be really neat. I wouldn't mind that one bit except for the memory utilization inherent to the rendering and supporting doc/stylesheet structure. Life is full of 'small' concessions..

[learn-more]

It does not have to be MDI?
Split views would already be a solution to this imo.

[gdude2002]

Split views would work fine for me as long as they're within the same overall window. There'd be a few things to consider though, eg the mechanics of switching channels and whether each view has its own input

[Hebgbs]

Pidgin does this! How the hell doesn't GTK support this when Pidgin and Gimp does tab splitting, joining and arranging so well?

[TingPing]

@Hebgbs Gtk provides nothing built in like this. It is a general purpose and extensible toolkit of course an application can implement features on top of it.