[Lazarus] Made dockable IDE work :-)

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Sven Barth schrieb:

> Would you please tell me what type of docking you are using?

Ordinary drag-dock (using my EasyDock... ;-)

> I am using anchor docking without any problems with docking and 
> undocking windows (on Linux as well as on Win32).

Does this mean that anchor docking now allows for drag-dock?

> I have also tried easy 
> docking on Win32 at first, but while docking and undocking itself worked 
> it had some other troubles (I don't say that anchor docking has no 
> problems, but they are less troublesome ^^).

The EasyDockTree was the first really working implementation of an 
dockmanager in Lazarus. It took years to convince the developers of 
providing the required support in the LCL, and perhaps some more years 
to fix the remaining problems. [Today I noticed that the docksites are 
not initialized properly, a manual resize of the parent is required for 
that]. Breaking drag-dock instead seems to be a matter of only a few 
weeks. OTOH this demonstrates that docking is almost unused, probably 
due to the problems arising all the time.


Currently I'm thinking again of an installable DragManager, so that the 
LCL must not be recompiled for every minor change (like adding debug 
messages). But this project requires access to the protected methods in 
TControl and TWinControl, and persistent storage of the registered 
docksites (not destroyed when another dragmanager is installed). In my 
own Lazarus version I can change that without problems, but it requires 
that every interested user has to patch the "official" LCL for that.

DoDi