Make Vocal use adaptive design patterns using libhandy

[ArenM]

When opening vocal on a device with a small screen (such as a phone), the window can be larger than the screen making it quite difficult to use. It would be great if the ui of vocal could be modified to handle smaller screen/window sizes.

I think that setting notebook.homogeneous to false in MainWindow.vala could help a bit, by making the panes that need work more obvious.

I would like to work on this. I've heard that libhandy is the tool to use to rearrange layout based on window size, would a pull request that uses it be accepted?

[nathandyer]

Hi @ArenM! One of the big goals for the project this year is to use libhandy basically everywhere we can, in part so it can better work on phones and tablets, but also so that we can take advantage of the gestures that libhandy provides (speaking personally, I have both a touchscreen and a touchpad, and would love to be able to use the gestures for both).

We would certainly be open to PRs that use libhandy. We need to make sure that we do everything properly and make the right decisions from both an engineering and UX perspective. Once we get this next version out of the door we'll make this a major focus. I would recommend waiting to get started with the code until we can get some sketches in place and plan out which widgets make sense for various things. I'll reply back to this issue when we're in a better place to get started with those design plans. I'd love for you to be a part of the conversations! I'll keep you posted.

[nathandyer]

Hello! Better late than never! :) Vocal has been re-written for GTK4 and libadwaita (which supersedes libhandy), so this is now complete.