Gimp's sidebar has been there for ages, and it's contextual and it has
tons of properties and settings you can control from there. It doesn't
substitute the menus but it's very practical and modern (at the time as
today -- not sure what software adopted the model for the first time,
but it's never been abandoned).
I believe our sidebar could be better, less clutered and usable if we
adopted something like gimp's one. I don't like buttons that much,
personnally, but I believe this could be a good solution for the sidebar.
In short, it's not much more than relocating the buttons bar to the
side, and taking use of the extra space to add contextual content inline
(as opposed to in a dialog). The way it's been implemented, it looks
like different things were just thrown there together.
The sidebar offers plenty of vertical space, but it shouldn't use much
horizontal space. That's why lists don't fit in it well. We should have
buttons for tools and categories of controls in the upper part, and the
more thorough properties and choices and options for each category or
tool in the bottom part. This is clean, logical, sensible and takes less
space. It involves a complete redesign too, but I guess we don't have
much choice at this point.
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