Monterey plugins | Plugin API

Plugin design sketches

The task at hand is to implement the functionality needed to organize screen layout of Monterey and its external tools in a way to optimize the screen real estate:

Image 1

• Monterey took it's "narrow" form showing only tiles that are relevant to the current task (this is not the case on the Image 1, which shows more tiles than it should)
• The "associated" editor instance (Atom in this case) is positioned immediately to the right of Monterey.
• The browser running the application under development is positioned to the right of the Editor.

The layout depicted on Image 1 (as well as any other that might make sense) will be created and subsequently managed by the Layout manager. Each created layout configuration will be persisted as a global and or local preference:

Image 2

Layout creation

The layout creation process is simple - the actual screen area is scaled to the proper size and the tools (the left most column contains the list of all supported tools) are placed to the desired locations using the drag and drop metaphor. Note that the green rectangle is the place holder for Monterey itself in its "narrow" form (I did not bother to create a scaled down image of the Monterey to show it there)

Image 3

The design on Image 2 is solely focused on layout creation - it is missing the user interface to store the created design.

Layout selection

The Layout manager tile is used to create, edit and persist layouts. The Monterey's Preferences panel based Tools layout tab(see image 2 above) allows the selection of the specific prebuilt layout created with the Layout manager tile as depicted below:

Image 4

Note: instead of "splitting" the layout creation and selection between the Layout tile and Preferences tab, we could unite both panels in the Preferences section.