Dock document window without group restriction

Hi Tong,

If using document MDI you can only make all-horizontal or all-vertical tab groups. We designed that after how Visual Studio works.

However I'm not sure if you noticed but we do have another document MDI mode, called tool window inner-fill. In that mode, everything must be a tool window. Tool windows essentially fill the entire host container control so there is no "document MDI area" since the tool windows completely fill that area. So in that mode, you can do horizontal or vertical docking just like with tool windows in a regular mode.

Thanks,

I know the tool window inner-fill. It is very useful. I just feel the document window and tool window has different looks. The document window's tab is on the top and has a different shape with different navigation button. These differences distinguish the document window from tool window, and make it as the main focus.

I'm just wondering what the UI advantages of the group restriction are: make UI less complicated, make user interaction more predicable? For me, for a big screen, I would like to arrange my source code (in visual studio) in any direction.

Anyway, for now, I would just use the tool windows as the document window so that the user has the option to dock it any way they like if they turn them back to a tool window.

Hi Tong,

Maybe Microsoft felt that the user interface became too cluttered when allowing documents to be docked in multiple directions since that would somewhat conflict with the tool window hierarchy. Or maybe they were just lazy. :)

I'll add it to the TODO list as a suggestion though. Thanks!