Problem

We have a Hypothesis that we need to open all we open in the accessory panels inside the main panel, and treat the content of a document as another "panel" so we can switch between content, discussions, activity, collaborators and directory.

This project is related to hm://z6MkuBbsB1HbSNXLvJCRCrPhimY6g7tzhr4qvcYKPuSZzhno/projects/web-navigation-infrastructure?l project. I hope this project can either unblock it or improve/enhance it.

Solution

Add a new routing schema in the app

the way I see we can do is to add a new key to the document route schema and the draft route schema for the "mainPanel", and here we can set an object similar to what we have for the accessory panel ({key: "content"}, {key: "activity"}, ...)

Make the Document Tools change what is visible in the main panel by default

When users click the document tools buttons, instead of opening the panels on the side (accessory), users will change what is visible in the main panel.

Add a way to open panels in the accessory panel with a shortcut or a separate button

To open panels in the accessory, we can either add a shortcut (like clicking a document tools link + shift) or a special button in the opened panels to "send them to the accessory". Final UI/UX is TBD

You can see a more technical explanation of the solution here:

download

Scope

1 week

Rabbit Holes

on mobile web, we are going to try to do the same, but maybe the interaction with the panels and the main panel will stay the same. this is also TBD and open for discussion.

No Gos

we don't want for now to let users open ALL the panels at once. As much as hm://z6Mkvz9TgGtv9zsGsdrksfNk1ajbFancgHREJEz3Y2HsAVdk wants this to be a reality (treat this as VSCode tabs or panels for example), is clearly Out of Scope because we need to do big architectural changes to the desktop app codebase to accomplish this.