[Aptitude-devel] Reorganizing the preview display

[Daniel Burrows]

  Hi all,

  I have another idea that I'd like to float.

  I've noticed that the preview pane seems "cluttered".  The section
headings look kind of messy, and it's hard to get a feeling for what's
actually changing.

  I think it might be better (also more attractive) if we had a
list-view on the left showing the categories of packages and how many
fall into each category:

+---------+---------------------------------------+--------------+
|         |                                       |              |
| All Pkgs|                                       |              |
| (N Pkgs)|                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
| Install |                                       |              |
| (N Pkgs)|                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
| Remove  |     Package List                      |  Package     |
| (N Pkgs)|                                       |  Description |
|         |                                       |              |
| ...     |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
|         |                                       |              |
+---------+---------------------------------------+--------------+

  We might even want to make categories like "install" expandable so
the user could pick only "manually installed", "automatically
installed", etc.  And of course the list entries should have icons,
maybe colors, text that is better than what I could fit into the space
above, etc.

  One problem might be that Synaptic users are used to seeing searches
in a list on the left; it could be surprising to have something similar
but not the same appear there.

  Daniel