[Epiphany] Re: Window placement

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Marco Pesenti Gritti writes: 

> On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 20:54, Osma Ahvenlampi wrote:
>> On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 19:02, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
>> > Well there is a general usability principle called spatial orientation. The 
>> > idea is that if you put something somewhere, it should remain there. this 
>> > works very well for unique windows (ie property windows, bme, history  
>> 
>> What's wrong with just saving the window size and letting the window
>> manager worry about position? :) 
>> 
>> Seriously, yes, spatial orientation is important, but in the X11 world,
>> it _really_ is the window manager's job to handle that. IT should
>> remember where it positioned a specific window earlier, and some WMs
>> indeed do, sawfish for example. I don't think metacity does, but that
>> could be considered a bug. A quick search in bugzilla reveals Havoc
>> disagrees with me, at least on short-term, but apparently more because
>> he thinks the wm<->app communication is too limited than because it's
>> better for the app to do it. There is a patch for metacity: 
>> 
>> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81802
> 
> Looks like the work is continuing on: 
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91481 
> 
> I dont see a problem if we keep saving window position until that code
> lands though. (maybe it was not worth the trouble if we did know it
> before ... but now that the code is there ...) 
> 

Just for the record I completely disagree with putting this in the window 
manager for the simple reason that saving window position in a document 
oriented way requires a full blown metadata system (which we have) and that 
a wm will never have. for instance in nautilus, folder position is saved per 
folder, however if you rename a folder, the position is still saved. THis is 
because the nautilus metadata system has a really nice way of keeping track 
of folders regardless of their name. A wm on the other hand will never have 
the richness of information that an app will have (because it will never 
have a full blown metadata implementation). for instance if we save the 
position of property windows per window (as I think we should) users can 
rename bookmarks, change the location etc. without affecting the state 
saving code because state is saved per bookmark node, not based on bookmark 
name etc. This would never work in the wm because it only can save state 
based on window name and class and perhaps application name. considering 
that each epiphany window's title is based on the currently viewed location 
i doubt this would ever work using the wm. 

dave