ChimeraX Help Viewer (browser) behaving strangely

[Elaine Meng]

(1) now when I start Help Viewer from the Help menu or by opening a URL with the “open” command, it appears as a vertically scrunched, only about as tall as its top icon bar.

(2) even though it is not set to be a dockable tool, after certain (possibly uncoordinated, we’re talking about me here) mouse movements to resize andmove the window around, it docks into the ChimeraX overall window and becomes the scrunched version again.

Attached screenshot scrunched.png - when I show its context menu in the state you can see in this screenshot, “Dockable Tool” is unchecked.

Greg: I can reproduce this on Linux [ECM: I guess referring to the scrunched size.] Not sure what changed to cause this. I reverted my build to the earlier Qt (5.12) and it has the same problem.

TomG: January 15 mac ChimeraX shows help viewer at correct size. Feb 20 shows it at minimum height. Tested "help volume"

[Elaine Meng]

Aha, redocking is caused by double-clicking the Help Viewer title bar even when its preference is set to dockable false.  I guess I have twitchy fingers, because I wasn’t intending to doubleclick, just move the window around.  So I’m thinking this problem is independent of the initial scrunching problem, although it also happens to have the side effect of making the window much shorter vertically.  I do not know if this redocking when it’s not supposed to is a new problem or not.

[pett]

The docking of a no-dock window by double-clicking the title bar just seems to be a "feature" of Qt. For instance, I just did it with the Shell tool. Setting "undockable tool" sets the allowed docking areas to None, but double clicking the title bar seems to override this. You can also double click the title bar of a docked tool to float it.

[Elaine Meng]

I would call it a bug, not a feature, but if it’s too hard to block the insertion, I guess I have to live with it.

I documented all this doubleclicking title bar stuff long ago, but didn’t think/realize it would override the ChimeraX preference of the tool.

[pett]

Mr Google says I could prevent it by installing an event filter to filter out title-bar double clicks. Ugh. Doesn't seem bad enough to resort to doing that.

[Elaine Meng]

Fine with me, as
(a) probably nobody else is uncoordinated enough to doubleclick by accident
(b) maybe some people might even want to override the preference

I may not describe this detail (override) in the docs unless somebody thinks I should.

[pett]

I wouldn't describe it in the docs since Qt might treat it as a bug, so it might be "fixed" in some later release [though I consider it unlikely].

[pett]

The Basic Actions tools also suffers from the zero-height problem, though File History (another HTML-based GUI) does not.

[pett]

After figuring out how to get ViewDockX to start, it also is zero height.

[pett]

Blast Protein and 3rd-party Molecular Dynamics Viewer also zero height, though obviously Log is not. So, for some reason Log and File History come up normal height whereas every other HTML-based GUI does not. Weird.

[pett]

Behavior is the same on Linux.

[goddard@…]

January 15 ChimeraX build shows Help Viewer with correct height.  February 20 ChimeraX build shows squished height.  macOS Catalina.  If it happens on Windows I might have more builds between mid January and mid February to narrow it down.

[Tom Goddard]

Bug also appears on Windows, working in Feb 13 daily, broken in Feb 20 daily.

Cause is in ui/gui.py in ToolWindow.manage(), the last line

self.shown = not initially_hidden

Calling self.shown = True at the end of manage() causes the size error. Have not figured out why. I added this line some weeks ago so that new tools cause a "tool window show" trigger to fire.

[Tom Goddard]

Fixed.

Calling DockWidget.show() after managing the HTML widget causes height zero. This seems like a Qt bug. Changed code so it does not call DockWidget.show() but still calls the "tool window show" trigger used by VR to detect new tool windows.