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What I find often very annoying while using Mylyn is, that it hides leaf-children of elements that I am actively inspecting. E.g. while trying to analyze a bug I am walking down some branch in the source tree of a project. I follow down the package structure to a package (or directory) of interest, but when I reach the bottom-most directory, that directory appears empty. Mylyn is hiding all .java files in that directory, because (so far) they were not part of the context. Pardon, but IMHO this is non-sense! It requires me to interrupt my flow of thought in order for first disable Mylyn so that I can actually see the files and only then I can pick the one(s) of interest. In short: when opening or selecting a package or directory ALL its children need to be visible! They can be dimmed or in some special color as hint that they are not (yet) part of the context, but they need to be visible, esp. when I open that package or directory the first time! Michael
Michael: we support the "I need to see all the children of this thing" use case with the Alt+click UI. So to see all the the compilation units in a Package, just Alt+click the package, similarly for a type, etc. http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_User_Guide#Alt.2BClick_navigation Also see the first item of the Task-Focused UI navigation section at: http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/new/ For special cases, such as seeing all the methods in a file, Mylyn users tend to rely on mechanisms like Ctrl+O. Could you try that, and let me know how it meets your needs?
Well - yes - it meets my needs (and sorry that I haven't seen that before). Although I have to admit: I am not a big fan of Keyboard plus Mouse-click combinations. I would prefer a mouse-only mechanism, like clicking on an already selected item again to unveil its children (or maybe double-clicking it, which appears to me also quite intuitive, since unveiling the previously hidden children of a node is a bit like "opening" it (which is the usual meaning of "double-clicking" an item). Or simply show the [+] in front of items that have further children (but only dimmed). Then clicking on that shows all children which is the normal function, i.e. no special action needed. I find this hiding of the [+] for elements that do indeed have children a bit strange anyway. Thanks and cheers, Michael
Thanks for the feedback Michael. We are continually trying to figure out how to improve this UI and make it more discoverable and obvious, because it is a new addition of Mylyn's that's not easy to discover. We have recently added a popup menu item, and tooltips on the Focus on Active Task actions to add to this. The challenge with some of your suggestions is that they can violate either Eclipse or the underlying OS's guidelines for interacting with the tree, and we have tried to settle on a lowest-common denominator that supports both. We could still consider drawing a custom widget for expanding the tree though, for example, some kind of special "..." after the node's label. Please consider adding your thoughts on this to bug 175655. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 175655 ***
