CDR Tickets

This ticket is labeled as "Improvement" but I don't see any indication in the description as to what you want me to "improve." Do you want me to convince the vendor to make the displayed list longer? Shorter? As for consistency, as far as I can tell, the software is consistently showing you as many of the components in each path as will fit in the allotted space. It looks as if "ReadOnly" takes up slightly less space than "Checkout" (when proportional fonts are used, as they are here), so the files which are in the "ReadOnly" directory get that component of the path display, but there's not enough space to do the same for the files in the "Checkout" directory. I suppose we could embark on a campaign to convince the vendor to make the display "more consistent" by having the software calculate the maximum number of path nodes which can be displayed for all of the files in the list, and implementing "consistency" by restricting the number of path nodes to that number for all of the files. I'm not optimistic such a campaign would succeed, for the following reasons:

1. it's quite possible (likely, even) that XMetaL is using stock UI components for this display which are dictating what "consistency" means in this context

2. the vendor would have to convince all of their customers to accept a display which reduces the amount of information provided (at least now you can tell which files are in which directory, and such a change would remove that information)

I think at least mentioning this (file path display) to the vendor should be good although, it is not a major issue. 

Also, in XMetal 9. The list of items appears to consistently show the last 5 items accessed, and the window does not get too long. If we can convince the vendor to do the same for XMetal 17, that would be great. I must say however, that I don't think this is a feature we use a lot so it would probably not have any negative effect.

If you want fewer files to show up in that list, why don't you just go to Tools > Options > Environment > File and lower the value to the number of entries you want to see. As for trying to get XMetaL to stop showing us which files are in the ReadOnly directory, I can't see why you'd want to do that. I certainly don't want to lose that information, and I doubt many of the other users do either.