ReactOS Forum

Premised that I've never used ReactOS, and I understand it's still a work in progress..
I was wondering if there are some ideas "in the air" about the design of dialog/options windows of the OS and maybe its core apps.

During the years, I've seen many different philosophies:

1. a lot of small nested dialog boxes that pop up, like classic Windows.
2. a single window, with a main "tree" of categories on the side, and the dialog boxes embedded on the window itself, switched from one another via the tree. An example would be the old TweakUI utility, or LibreOffice's options window.
3. similar to the previous, but instead of the tree, the dialog boxes are switched via tabs (sometimes nested). Old versions of MS-Office did this.
4. like the previous two, but some options appear in multiple categories, adding confusion IMO. Skype had this years ago, dunno now.
5. the modern Windows disaster, where windows have an incoherent salad of controls, degins and behaviors: some buttons open dialogs; some open new windows; some text behave like weblinks, and opens a new "page" inside the same window; some other text looks like weblinks, but behave like buttons; some links even allow cyclic movement through the windows; etc.

Surely there are others, but these are the main designs I can think of.

My hope is that ReactOS does not follow the modern Windows footsteps and make the Control Panel an unusable monster.
Personally, I think that the 2nd design I've listed is the most usable one.

Thank you for your attention. Comments are welcomed

The ReactOS project's compatibility target is Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Generally, the ReactOS developers tend to replicate the behavior of that operating system as much as possible.

Cosmonauta, (I guess you speak spanish as me ) feel you free to make your work (if you have code skills, or if you are a designer, show it graphically) and maybe some other people would be interested on it, and who knows, it can be merged at least on a branch or an optional feature.

There are oses that do it differently and I see the benefits of having alternative approaches, some of which you describe. The good thing about ReactOS is that it might encourage some to implement Windows functionality and others to do something completely different. ReactOS could be forked to create the same o/s with a different method of displaying pertinent system information and interacting with the user. That is the beauty of open source.

However, it is not going to happen now as the target of NT5 is set and the developers are making good progress toward that goal.

In the future, when ReactOS is ready and you have the necessary programming skills you could even consider making those changes yourself.

Thanks for the replies.
At the moment I have zero free time, but in the future, who knows..