Feature Request: Fold/Expand UI for Dialog Boxes

[Syed]

Hi Volker,
First of all, thank you for your incredible work on FET. The application is a masterpiece of thoughtful design and functionality, and your dedication to keeping it free and open source is truly admirable. You've empowered countless educators and institutions around the world with a tool that's both powerful and elegant—hats off to you!
I'd like to suggest a UI enhancement that could make FET even more user-friendly. In dialogs such as Activities, Subjects, Teachers, Students, and Constraints, the lists can become quite long and difficult to navigate. It would be extremely helpful to have a fold/expand toggle for grouped items—similar to how code folding works in editors like VS Code.
For example:
•    In the Activities dialog, fold all activities under "O1 Business" or "O2 Science"
•    In the Subjects dialog, collapse subjects by department or level
•    In Constraints, group and fold by type (e.g., time constraints, space constraints)
This would make it much easier to focus on specific sections without excessive scrolling, especially when working on large timetables.
Thanks again for your continued work and generosity in maintaining FET!

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, Syed,

Thank you for your kind words! We are flattered.

I will add your words in the list of suggestions (TODO file) for FET. I, personally, did not use VS Code, but I think I understand the idea.

However, unfortunately, in FET, subjects and teachers are uncategorized, meaning that we cannot decide how to fold them.

Also, the activities are in a fixed order, but maybe a folding for the same activity group id might be useful.

For the constraints, they are in arbitrary order, so folding might not be too useful if they are mixed, but it might be useful if they are more grouped by type.

Did you try the filtering in the activities and constraints dialogs?

[Volker Dirr]

Thank you, but Liviu done nearly all the work.

Maybe you don't know: But it might help you if you have for example sorted teachers. Because in that case you only need to press for example the key "s" in the combo box and you will jump to the first teacher name that starts with letter "s".

[Syed]

Thank you for your thoughtful response! I truly appreciate you taking the time to consider my suggestions and for adding them to the TODO list—it means a lot knowing they might contribute to FET's future development.

I only discovered FET last week, and I must say—it's a wonderful piece of software! I'm still exploring its features, but it's already clear how powerful and flexible it is for timetable planning. Kudos to you and Liviu for creating such a robust tool!

Regarding your questions:

• Filtering in dialogs: Yes, I've tried filtering in the activities/constraints dialogs—it's quite helpful! The keyboard shortcut tip (e.g., pressing "s" to jump to names) is especially handy.
• Activity grouping: I see the challenge with uncategorized subjects/teachers. Attached is a mockup of how folding might look in the "Add Activity" dialog (grouped by activity type for clarity). It's just a rough idea—feel free to ignore if it's impractical!

Thanks again for your hard work and dedication. FET has already saved me hours of manual scheduling, and I'm excited to keep learning its advanced features.
Image Bellow

[Liviu Lalescu]

Thank you as well, Syed! But you forgot to attach the clarifying picture.

[Syed]

Sorry, here you go. Credit: Figma AI

[Liviu Lalescu]

It looks nice, Syed! I will search if it is possible (for me ) to have such a view (it is of course possible, but with my low interface skills it might be too difficult for me).

[Syed]

  Thanks a lot