Targets are a 12-inch tablet and a desktop (D15). That removes most of the
navigation question rather than answering it.
`EXPANDED_MIN_WIDTH` is 820 logical pixels and a 12-inch tablet is ~1024
across in portrait, so both orientations of both targets are the expanded
class. The compact class now fires only when a desktop window is dragged
narrow — graceful degradation, not a second interface. The bottom tool strip
and the one-tool-at-a-time sheet were solving a phone, and there is no phone.
What survives is input, not size, and the architecture had already decided
it: `WidgetDemand::precise_pointing` exists for a television remote, and its
own documentation says touch is fine because hit regions grow to the
modality. Touch changes hit regions, not layout. The rules that fall out are
worth stating because they are easy to violate by accident — no hover-only
affordance and no modifier key may be the sole route to anything, since a
tablet has neither. Local masking already lost its shift-click extend for
exactly this reason.
The guaranteed-wide viewport also pays for a better answer to the extent
problem than hiding things. The complaint was never that the column is long;
it is that the histogram scrolls away from the sliders it reports on.
Collapsing shortens the scroll, pinning removes the problem, and ~260px of
fixed height is affordable on a viewport that is never under 820 wide.
Local adjustments took the develop column from four panels to six, and the
operation set is meant to keep growing — FR-DEV-3 still lists texture,
clarity, sharpening and noise reduction as v1. But the count is the lesser
problem.
The real one is that local adjustments introduced a *mode* without
introducing a way to see it. Selecting a mask silently re-points thirty
sliders at that layer, and the histogram those sliders are judged against
goes on reporting the whole frame. I built that, and it is the fault that
loses work rather than merely slowing someone down.
Decided: local becomes a mode, in the sense `crop-mode` already is. The app
has the pattern, the user knows it, and it removes the ambiguity by
construction instead of describing it in a caption. It also inherits the
Escape/back stack that already leaves the innermost state first.
Recommended: diverge on **width**, not on platform. A tablet in landscape
wants what a desktop wants and a narrow desktop window wants what a phone
wants, so `cfg(target_os)` would give one physical situation two answers.
`apply_layout_class` already classifies on width and already remembers a
per-class override; this is a second consumer of a decision the app makes
anyway. What must not diverge is the controls — both layouts consume the
same generated capability model, so a new operation still needs no UI edit.
Left open, because it is taste: whether the wide layout eventually gains
tool tabs. Recorded rather than left to be rediscovered is the *legitimate*
route to them — a descriptor declaring an operation's nature, the same shape
as `Affects`, with the frontend free to render it as a tab or ignore it.
Deferred because ten operations do not need eight tabs and the field is easy
to add later and awkward to remove.
Surveys what Lightroom, Capture One, darktable and the phone editors
actually do, including the thing none of them do: make a mask a panel that
rewires a different panel.
dtourolle