1. The current idea was to add some kind of container widget, in which you can place other widgets and they share the same "context" e.g filters.
Sorry, but I do not like this idea. It makes the whole GUI concept more complex than it needs to be. We already have top-level windows and sub-windows/container-widgets. Anything beyond that will only confuse the user.
3. so basically you are saying i should add an ultra simple mode that displays only the children of one filter.
The biggest problem I see here is that you are using the same UI for editing and selecting filters. From my experience on a TC-class project these two tasks are not related most of the time.
The current filter tree widget is okay, if we use it only for one top-level filter and not the whole filtering for a complete project.
2. Choosing top level filters, could be done via loading another tree.
That does not mean you should not be able to load any filter config file into the existing one at any place you like.
This is more or less what I am asking for. By using this approach you would effectively give the top level filter a name (the file name). But I would suggest to not bother the user with filter file handling. Load all filters on project load (for now we can keep a separate selection of filters per esx file somewhere in the editors config directory) and just let the user select the name of the filter he wants to edit.
The following is just a first proposal how to improve the current UI in this regard (we probably can come up with something better).
- Add a combo box to (the top of) the filter tree widget, that lets the user select which top-level filter he is currently viewing and editing.
- (maybe) Cut out the enable/disable functions for individual filter elements. I don't see a use for them, but maybe I am missing a use case here.
- Add another combo box to the ID List widget, that lets the user select which top-level filter is applied to this ID list.
- Cut any connection between filter tree widget and ID List widget. If the user wants to edit the filter in real time (while viewing the filtered ID list), he just needs to select the same top level filter for both.