Re: close button on terminal tabs

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 07:33:47PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 15:42, Evan Martin wrote:
> > Is there a good argument why tabbing shouldn't be handled by the window
> > manager?[1]  
> 
> In my opinion, having written a window manager and large bits of
> toolkit, it is not really feasible. Or at least the effort far exceeds
> the gains.
> 
> But it's open source and anyone is welcome to prove me wrong. ;-)

I think you're right. Also, I don't think it's reasonable to consider WM
tabs (or bother with tabbed MDI) until bugs in the current windowing are
fixed and more consideration is given to application design.

Windowing bugs we have now include:
 - incorrect window typing
   - dialogs that should be utility windows, and vice-versa
   - non-modals that should modals, and vice-versa.
   - non-transients that should be transient (I've not see this reversed)
   - changing the transience hint among windows instead of setting it
     to None or the root as mentioned in the wm-spec.
 - transient handling (there's a metacity bug for this)
 - keyboard navigation (there's a metacity bug for this too)
 - loss of window geometry (culpability undetermined)

Application design issues include:
 - undefined documents
   - a spreadsheet, with its tabbed pages, is one document. This isn't MDI.
   - A code project, with all its component files is a single document even
     though each file may be treated as a document individually. An IDE
     with files on tabs could be either MDI or SDI, depending on how the
     rest of the interface is done.
     - Even designed as SDI, it still an open question whether tabs are a
       good way to show document parts. No one has studied this, afaik.
   - a group of files loaded in one window with no persistent association
     (i.e., with only the user's temporary association) is an MDI.
 - secondary suffocation: some apps use secondary windows where controls
   in the primary window would be better suited to task. The windowing bugs
   exacerbate this.
 - inappropriate duplicates - e.g., Font Preferences can be shown multiple
   times.

There may also be system-wide ways to eliminate or alleviate window clutter.
Workspaces are as existing method, for example.

Please note I'm using Debian Sid/Experimental, not CVS HEAD. Some of these
bugs may already be gone.


Cheers,
Greg