Re: [Usability] HIG and MDI/SDI/Tabs

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 12:20:04PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> Although it's not currently very clear, the HIG is really only advising
> against the hard-coding of such window management policies into the
> applications... the hope is that one day, window managers will let the
> user choose between multi-document models  (MDI, tabs, multiple top
> level windows, anything else that's invented in the meantime) for any
> particular application.  

I feel pretty sure that this can't or shouldn't be done in the window
manager; it's really something that belongs in a standard GTK widget.

We'd like to see such a widget for GTK 2.6. It may also want to cover
"IDE MDI" also which is somewhat more complex as it's not just
documents, it also has random dockable utility windows etc.

What I'd like to see from the UI team is a recommendation for how apps
should work in some detail:

 - web browser (read-only documents, tabs popular now)
 - IDE (editable documents, with lots of auxiliary dockable thingies)
 - office apps (editable documents, but no auxiliary thingies)
 - GIMP (editable documents, but many people claim it's different
         from the office apps somehow)

What is the ideal kind of "big picture" organization of these apps,
how does the window manager, window list, Alt+Tab, etc. fit in, 
what is the workflow.

Then we know what to implement in the WM and the GTK widget.

Havoc