== An irritation with current GUI interfaces

Why are programs so convinced that I have horizontal real estate to give
them? Everything seems to want to put important information in sidebars
and panels and so on (usually non-optional ones).

I don't know about other people, but for me horizontal screen space is
more precious than vertical screen space. If you eat vertical space all
that happens is that I get fewer lines of your real content (which is
still irritating; please don't). But if you eat horizontal content, your
application gradually takes over my entire screen, because I don't have
any space left to put things besides it.

(It's no wonder that running one program at a time in full-screen mode
is so popular.)

I don't know where this design approach comes from, although
I suspect that some of it is a lingering remnant of [[MDI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface]] (itself one
of the more wretched and arrogant ideas in GUI interfaces).

(I don't consider the ever-expanding sidebars approach to be true
[[MDI]] because I restrict my [[MDI]] hissing and spitting to
interfaces that leave dead space inside their window.)

If programs have to have this sort of interface, I wish for two things:
the ability to completely close the sidebars (many programs seem to give
them a minimum size) and the ability to rip the sidebars off as separate
top-level windows, so I can park them somewhere more useful. Programs
earn bonus points for remembering how big I had sidebars before I closed
them and then re-opening them at the same size.

(This rant has been brought to you by the current interface of
Evolution, which glues a list of accounts and folders to the left side
of the content window, even when all I am doing is reading email from one
folder and it is a complete waste of space.)