Cache & re-use prior toggle state (e.g., for stacked bar chart)

[philrz]

Repro is with Zui commit cf615ef.

The attached video captures a situation I found myself in recently: Working with lots of scratch data that doesn't happen to have the ts field that would trigger the population of the stacked bar chart. Specifically here I'm working with the three NDJSON data files from the Zed join tutorial. My goal was to load them in each of three separate tabs and eventually write some large queries for each in the editor. I had no need for the stacked bar chart and having so much screen space populated with the Unable to determine date range using 'ts' message seemed wasteful, so I ended up clicking the toggle on each new tab to turn off the stacked bar chart.

Repro.mp4

I showed this use case to @jameskerr to think about possible improvements, with my first idea being to imagine a "tri-state" toggle, e.g., like if I could right-click on the stacked bar chart toggle and have an additional option revealed to turn it off persistently, or something like that. @jameskerr responded with two counter-proposals which are probably better:

How about any new tabs will inherit the settings for the last opened tab?
Or every time you change it, it remembers that setting for any future tabs.

Having given it some thought, the latter of those two feels like my favorite, but either seems workable.

I'm not sure if we might want to be consistent by giving the Inspector / Table choice the same treatment. I've not found myself wishing for that yet, but if a user has a strong preference for the non-default Inspector view I could indeed imagine this being desirable.