adding and removing elements

What is the best way to add/remove elements dynamically? Consider a program like GNU Screen, where you want to dynamically add and remove sub-windows.

Is there any way to add a new element, except by calling destroy and then creating a new Split object? It would seem this could cause minor flicker or jumps.

I can see at least 3 useful add “modes” for adding an element at position i:

1. Initialize the sizes to all elements have the same size. That cause non-neighbor elements to “jump” so you probably wouldn’t want that.
2. Split the “current” (either i or i-1) element into 2 equal halves.
3. Split the neighboring elements i-1 and i into thirds.

To delete an element there is collapse, but that doesn’t seem to be what we’re looping for.

[PerBothner]

My ideal would be a general package for managing panes, that would support:

1. Create or remove panes using functions (which might be bound to keyboard events). This could use Split.js.
2. Re-arrange panes around by dragging. (The dragabilly package could be used.) (Bonus points if a pane can be dragged from one top-level window to another, but that has extra challenges.)
3. Optional tabs, and being able to re-order tabs or convert them to/from panes. (The chrome-tabs package makes use of dragabilly.) An advantage of supporting tabs is that tabs provide a natural “handle” for dragging panes.

Toolkits that I’ve used that support all of these include the Atom editor and the NetBeans IDE. It would be great to be able to do it with portable JavaScript.

I’ve been thinking about how to add these features to DomTerm, though for now I’m seeing whether I can get Atom to do what I want. That has its own challenges.

[lezhnev74]

I like the simplicity of this library, I believe it has big potential. Do you plan to extend API with mentioned add()/remove() commands or similar? My +1 for this.