I built applications on top of the Netbeans Platform for a long time, and users would always end up with these completely customized window configurations based on where they dragged things, thus making it extremely difficult for anyone else to use their setup or understand what was going on if viewing their screen. Not sure if that is a good thing (great customization) or bad thing (too cluttered and inconsistent) in the end.

Its not that I don't like the customize-all approach there, I don't like when there are 999 possible frame positions and you can't really drag the frame where you want easily since you need to aim "that damn 1px above the other frame" and such. And sometimes you can't even understand where you have to drag the frame to get the desired effect. This is what I don't like.

IntelliJ Idea's dockable pane is pretty customizable - you can have any frame at any position around the middle (content) area. It just doesn't have more than 8 positions for frames - top left/right, bottom left/right, left top/bottom, right top/bottom. I have worked with a lot of different apps which use some kind of docking panes (photoshop, IDEs, visual designers, mail clients etc. etc.) and I am sure that those positions are more than enough to fit almost any situation. Probably I will add a few more possible frame positions later, but not with the first release for sure.

There is also a pretty simple explanation for the cases. For example - why don't put more than two frames on the same side? - because usually there won't be enough space to see the frame content.

The only docking feature that I find awkward to use in IntelliJ is the way the "Split Mode" feature works, or perhaps it is just the way it is named.

Never used it before, I just started to drag frame buttons around and simply found that its enough to place buttons apart on the same side to get the split between two frames. But I agree that the way split can be done is not obvious at all and that this "split" feature is totally useless and confusing.

I weren't going to implement it or any other "strange" features anyway. I was talking mostly about the frames composition when refering to IntelliJ Idea.

Basically I am going to make two draggable parts: the frame itself (for example - drag it to the side of the another frame to get the split) and frame's button (same as in the IntelliJ Idea).

One other thing I would like to see (and you'd probably do this without me mentioning it) is the ability to enable or disable closing, hiding, floating, moving, etc. for any given panel.

Yes, there will be a lot of options including these.

Add dockable pane and dockable frame components #37

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