Re: WindowSizer

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 19:58, Mikael Carneholm wrote:
> Don't know how many of you read osnews on a daily basis, but I noticed this post
> today:
> 
> http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=7406
> 
> If anyone recalls my earlier posting to this list (see
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-March/msg00038.html),
> this looks very much like what I was thinking about.
> 
> Just a little poll: how many of you think this functionality would be of any use
> for the GNOME desktop?

Eclipse basically works this way.

The simple addition to metacity would be an "arrange windows" command or
commands, which would do a one-time arrangement (wouldn't do the
"locking" found in WindowSizer)

Just looking at screenshots, I think WindowSizer looks too manual - the
user has to do too much meta/conceptual work to get any benefit. The key
to a great UI feature along these lines would be to make it happen
automatically. I'd say that's a pretty tough task.

I don't think heuristic broken hacks based on window class or something
would be sufficient. You'd have to do a lot of fundamental work on hard
problems such as how to save window state, how to save the session, etc.

But even then, arranging the windows in the first place seems to require
user intervention (or sysadmins defining what each user will have).

Havoc