It may seem trivial, but I unlocked an achievement on Marzipan: I added a menu. I’ve been wanting to have a few “quality of life” improvements for a while now, but so far I had been hiding under the duvet of “I really don’t want to touch the UI/Qt code more than I strictly have to”.

My experience with graphical toolkits in general has never been great. It’s really out of my comfort zone; I tend to find that the tutorials on the Internet don’t have anything between an equivalent of “Hello, World!” and an equivalent of “here’s some advanced quantum mechanics” (I do suck at physics in general as well); I kind of have the impression that my use cases are dead simple and should just Be Available As Is and that For Sure I Don’t Need To Read All That Documentation. (Yeah, yeah, I may be somewhat guilty here.) And I get upset and impatient, and generally speaking it’s not a good experience – neither for myself nor for anyone else in the room. (My apologies to my husband!)

But when you’re the only coder and the only user of a project, at some point biting the bullet gets inevitable. Consequently, in the last pull request, I did a fair amount of refactoring. When I started my coding session, everything was contained in a QWindow, in which I was painting an image directly on the QBackingStore. I then read a bunch of stuff about menus, which made me update my QWindow to a QMainWindow – for which the QBackingStore seems less trivially accessible, so I modified that. But then, the refresh was only working when resizing the window, which kind of sucked (and I’m still not entirely sure why). So I put a QWidget inside my QMainWindow as a main widget, and that allowed me to have both the refresh and the menu – yay! I needed to tinker a bit more to get back the keyboard control (move them from the QWidget to the QMainWindow), and now it’s all nice and shiny.

The undo/redo function itself is basically storing the fractal parameters in a couple of stacks and re-computing on undo/redo – nothing fancy (and my memory management is utter shit – read “nonexistent”, I really need to fix that – and I don’t handle storing the orbits properly yet, but one thing at a time.)

As a result: I do have at least half-functional Undo/Redo, and more importantly, I have a reasonable base for future UI/QoL development: I hope that the major hurdle of figuring out how things might fit together is behind me, and I’m a bit less scared of it.

I can’t say I’m happy with that session, because I still have the impression that I tried to put stuff together while having no idea what I’m doing, and while having the impression that I’m not actually learning anything in the process, but this may actually be better than I think. We’ll see 🙂