When are modal dialogs truly necessary?

Question

Modal dialogs are evil, but I keep reading \"You should remove modal dialogs when possible\"

When isn\'t it possible to remove modal dialogs? I mean, what ar

Answer 1

Imagine an application which needs to open a dialog for some actions. Now imagine that these would be non-modal dialogs: while one dialog is open, you could change the selection or even worse - invoke a different command which itself opens another dialog. Now imagine the these dialogs would be modal: then you would have to close the dialog to proceed - you can't get in the state where the selection changes under a dialog or where two commands are waiting for input.