Re: MDI (not winMDI) frameworks ... again

[Sam Stephenson <sstephenson gmail com>]

On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 17:43:25 -0400, Tim <jpyobjc2004 yahoo ca> wrote:
> Firstly, I agree with all prior posts that M$ has destroyed the concept
> of MDI by having the window in window approach using a window menu and
> having maximized sub windows, tiled or cascaded. This type of MDI is
> what another user called winMDI and I totally agree that it sucks big time.
> 
> However, MDI is still used (very well I might add) by other applications
> such as IDE's (KDevelop, Netbeans, Eclipse and even Apples X-Code).
> 
> Many have suggested that MDI should be the job of the window manager.
> This cannot work for the time being since no *nix app should ever be
> tied into one window manager. Maybe someday in the long future when the
> WM world stabilizes sufficiently, this would work but for the
> foreseeable future this is an unrealistic ideal.
> 
> In the meantime, developers are left hanging with putting out apps that
> have just way too many windows. I've used Gimp on my OSX box and it
> totally sucks having to first clicking the window to get focus before
> being able to click the item. If the app ran on a MDI framework, this
> would not be necessary.
> 
> I have ton's of apps open at one time and if I did not have MDI for
> those apps, I'd have too many windows to manage.

Lots of GTK apps (Gaim, Galeon, gedit, and Epiphany, to name a few)
implement a sort of MDI using windows as containers and tabs with
close buttons for documents, but each application has to invent its
own framework for managing them. It'd be really convenient to have
that stuff built into GTK.

If you're interested, I've implemented such a framework in Ruby:

  http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?MDI
 
I could try my hand at porting it to C, but I'm not sure if my model
is the "right" way.

> Tim

Sam

> winMDI == evil
> MDI != evil (potentially)