Re: SciTE, GUIs, desktop real estate

["Eric Tetz" <erictetz@...>]

Gavin Wraith <gavin@wra1th.plus.com> wrote:
> Why 'split'? You might want to place multiple views anywhere on the screen.
> Why be limited to putting them next to each other?

You're splitting the view of *one window*. If you really need to have
two text windows with something else between them (What? A calculator?
Tetris? Why?) then you can open two windows (i.e. instances).

Within a given window, a split allows you to partition screen real
estate in such a way that growing/shrinking one view automatically
grows/shrinks all neighboring windows. That's how Brief did it, and
how Vim does it, and I can't stand MDI applications that work any
other way. If I decide to, say, shrink the amount of space I give to
one window, I don't want to do N additional resize operations to give
the reclaimed space to neighboring windows (left, right, above,
below).

In Vim, you have multiple tabs, too, so you can (1) have top level
windows, arraigned however you want, (2) within those windows, you can
partition the space however you want, such that reallocating space to
one window will reclaim/return space to neighboring windows, (3) you
can have multiple tabs, each providing a different split partitioning
of the same window.

In short, splits are hugely valuable, though not many applications do
them right (Brief sure did; better then Vim, in fact).