Horizontal split of half-screen mode

[mark2185]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Instead of having it split vertically where e.g. the commits take up half of the screen, and the code takes up the remaining half (and then everything gets wrapped), I'd rather it was one above the other.

Describe the solution you'd like
Up goes one half, down goes the other.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Couldn't find anything related to that in the configuration, I thought it might be affected by mainPanelSplitMode: 'vertical', but it's not (as expected).

[c02y]

+1 wrapping long lines is really annoying.

[51n7]

+1 and hoping for an update on this, thanks!

[hgustafsson]

I think it was very well described in #2364 how I would prefer to have the patch / commit details shown below the commit graph. Not only are the commit messages often clipped when having the current vertical split, but making it a horizontal split would also make it easier to view side-by-side diffs in the patch details.

[stefanhaller]

The change itself is easy, see here for a quick hack (it's interesting how this makes it look a lot more like gitk):

The challenge is how to make it configurable without introducing a mess of config settings that nobody understands. It seems that already today it's not clear what mainPanelSplitMode does. And there's also portraitMode, which, when set to "always", already gives you the desired layout in half-screen mode, but of course it also affects the normal mode too, which most people won't want.

Then there's the question of how to divide the space between upper and lower panel. For normal mode we have sidePanelWidth that allows you to configure the ratio, but for half-screen mode it's currently hard-coded to 1:1. I feel that even for the current vertical split it might be good to make this configurable, but even more for the new horizontal split mode; I feel 1:2 makes the most sense there (as in the screenshot above), so maybe we don't need a config for that if everybody agrees?

[stefanhaller]

Here's a PR if you want to test it: #3133

[hgustafsson]

This looks great! Thank you!

And thank you for explaining about portraitMode. I hadn't been able to make it work and thought I had misunderstood what it does, but now I realize that the setting was just implemented after the latest release 0.40.2 so I had to rebuild to make it work. Your PR allows for the option of a portrait mode only on half screen mode which is even better and exactly what I want.

I agree with the confusion of similar options. In #3133 you added the setting halfScreenSplitMode. What would you think about instead adding another option to portraitMode so that the options would be never, always, and now also half-mode (or something similar)?

[stk-ableton]

Glad to hear that this works for you. I'd also be interested in your opinion about hard-coding the 1:2 ratio for the vertical split mode.

I agree with the confusion of similar options. In #3133 you added the setting halfScreenSplitMode. What would you think about instead adding another option to portraitMode so that the options would be never, always, and now also half-mode (or something similar)?

I don't think this would work well, I see the two options as orthogonal. For example, when halfScreenSplitMode is set to "vertical", it should still be possible to decide between "never" and "auto" for portraitMode.

[hgustafsson]

I agree that a 1:2 ratio is much better than a 1:1 ratio for a vertical split. (Especially for the log panel)

Depending on what is done for the horizontal case in #3054 it may also make sense to make a separate setting for that.
Do you know if there has been any thoughts on making it resizable by keyboard shortcuts (e.g. similar to vim's Ctrl-W + and Ctrl-W - to resize splits)?

I don't think this would work well, I see the two options as orthogonal. For example, when halfScreenSplitMode is set to "vertical", it should still be possible to decide between "never" and "auto" for portraitMode.

You are right - hadn't thought about that.

[stefanhaller]

Do you know if there has been any thoughts on making it resizable by keyboard shortcuts (e.g. similar to vim's Ctrl-W + and Ctrl-W - to resize splits)?

I'm not aware of any such thoughts (that doesn't mean anything though, I joined the project pretty late). It would make sense, but the challenge is to find a free keybinding, as it has to be free in pretty much all views. Personally I'd love to be able to drag the frame between the views left or right (or up or down) with the mouse, like in gitk. I don't even think this would be terribly difficult to implement, but I haven't tried. We'd still want key bindings as well though, for those who turned off mouse support.

In both cases we'd have to decide how to persist the value; we'd probably store it in state.yml, and we can decide ourselves with what granularity we want to do that (at least separately for normal mode and half-screen mode, but in half-screen mode we might even store different settings depending on which side panel is active). The config.yml setting would have to be removed though, and we could consider migrating that value to state.yml for backwards compatibility.

Sounds fun, I'll play with this when I find some time.

[jesseduffield]

Yep, I've never really considered making windows adjustable, but I like the idea.

BTW @stefanhaller I'm testing this out locally and I like the 1:2 ratio. Happy for it to be hardcoded. I'll say more on the PR

[stefanhaller]

Implemented in #3133.