Ui resizing fixes

[luziferius]

This PR includes modifications to the Qt-Designer UI files to make stuff less rigid and more resizeable.

First 7 commits

The first commits only change ui files without touching any python code. Second commit fixes a small bug: The license text in the about dialog was not marked as read-only. I tried to keep the layout close to the original, while introducing resize-ability for the about window, the settings window, all settings window pages and the merge window. I replaced most of the stacked layout-widgets with single grid layouts.

Logger widget commit (8th)

The logger widget now shows a slightly different resizing-behaviour: The overview table containing the known log levels now non-greedily fills all available space. I widened the columns a bit, because I got text clipping on my system.

[busimus]

Damn, that's a lot, thank you for taking the time. Much of the change is good, but most of it I can't merge. There are just too many small things I don't like:

• Settings and merge dialog windows are too big by default,
• Settings window isn't really resizeable, as something is preventing it from becoming smaller,
• I like the label-checkbox pairs. I realize that's the opposite of how most desktop programs do it and I'll probably change my mind about it later, but not now.

I'm not sure what the best course of action is right now. I don't think it makes sense to change this pull request to what I would like it to be. So I could either implement some these changes myself, or you could try again from scratch (but I can understand if you feel that it's a selfish suggestion).

I think the first option is the optimal one, as collaborating on the UI feels weird. And also, .ui files are in a slow process of being phased out in favor of writing UIs in code (and the merge dialog is the next one on the list). I don't want anyone wasting much effort on them in the meantime.

What are your thoughts?

[luziferius]

The bullet points:

• That seems to be an unintended change on my side caused by the editor. That’s a trivial fix. I think I’ll use the git rebase to remove the changes.
• I can shrink the settings window up to a point where the largest page (the first) just fits in. It is intentional that it cannot shrink below this point, because doing so would cause clipping and thus is forbidden by the layout manager by default. It was possible previously, because there was no layout attached to the base window.
• I have just dropped the last 2 commits and removed this change. And I’m fine with not including these commits.

For the other changes, I’ll edit the commits to not include the size changes (which will happen later).

About phasing out the UI files: What is the reasoning for this? Personally, I do prefer the declarative approach using ui files over implementing the UI in code.

Side note: You can use the pyuic5 standalone application to convert UI files into python code. If you have clean UI files, you get clean python code and spare complete re-implementation.

[busimus]

I can shrink the settings window up to a point where the largest page (the first) just fits in

Just fits in? Do you have the default font size set high or something like that? This is how it looks for me at its smallest horizontal size, lots of free space. Can you post a screenshot of how the settings window from the master branch looks for you? Because it's a lot smaller so it must be clipping too. After all this is done I'll write the code to save the settings window size (and increase the default size a bit).

About phasing out the UI files: What is the reasoning for this?

• I do a lot of dumb stuff in the Designer (as you probably have figured out already) and whenever I rewrite a UI by hand I'm usually more satisfied with the end result (because it's harder to do dumb stuff in code).
• The only dialog that has a reason to be not in code is the settings one, because it's the most complicated one and it'd be harder to manipulate it in code.
• Less stuff in the resources is better.

I am aware of pyuic5 and I look at what it generates sometimes. But I only use it as a reference because a clean re-implementation is better and not hard at my UI complexity level.

[luziferius]

Hmmm. OK. I do admit that I had not tested the UI without the last 2 (now dropped) commits. There is some strange, spurious space right to the option texts, but it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/sHAii7j.png

After fiddling with the sizes a bit, I think it is OK now. I got the size down quite a bit. The screenshot above is slightly outdated.

• The merge dialog has its original size again.
• The settings dialog is a bit smaller now: The vertical spacers had a size hint attached. The layout engine seems to set the minimal window size to the largest size hint available, which caused the window to grow to some unexpected size.

[busimus]

Looks good. Thank you for your work!