blast results make window too tall for screen

[Elaine Meng]

in daily build UCSF ChimeraX version: 1.3.dev202109202344 (2021-09-20)

Maybe the Blast Results should appear as an undocked panel, because the panel is fairly large and changes the overall window size significantly. If I do two runs, it makes my window go off the screen and I can't see the command line any more.

[Elaine Meng]

Another possibility is to automatically tab blast results together (people could still untab them to compare if they wanted).  Finally, debloating both the initial blast protein dialog and the results dialog as suggested by Eric would also help:

From: Eric Pettersen <pett@cgl.ucsf.edu>
Subject: Widget spacing
Date: September 14, 2021 at 12:06:18 PM PDT
Hi Zach,
	Elaine pointed out to me that the Blast Protein widget layout puts a lot of space between the various widgets, and as you know screen real estate is kind of at a premium in the ChimeraX interface.  Anyway, you can pack the widgets more tightly by using .setContentsMargins(0,0,0,0) on your layout, and possibly .setSpacing(0) as well.  The tool.py file in the modeller bundle is an example.
--Eric

[Zach Pearson]

Let's try undocked panels first, and if you test them and they get annoying then I'll switch it to tabs.

[Elaine Meng]

Was there a change?  It's still showing up in the current daily build as docked rather than opening a separate window (e.g. Help Viewer starts as undocked).  Maybe I was overeager and tried it too soon, though :-D

[Elaine Meng]

On the other hand, since it may take a while for Blast results to show up, somebody may have their mouse focus in another application, which makes separate ChimeraX windows invisible... and they'd never see their results return.  At least with that current annoying behavior, it may be better to live with it showing up as docked for now. (Since I'm on a laptop it always annoys me by resizing my ChimeraX window partitions and messing up my view, but so be it.)

[Zach Pearson]

According to ​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21656500/adding-scrollbars-to-qdockwidgets-area we could make the root widget of the left and right QDockWidgets a QScrollArea and populate that ScrollArea in our tool management logic instead of the QDockWidget and solve this bug for all tools.