Re: Docking windows?

[James Smith <j-smith physics tamu edu>]

Tom Vogt wrote:
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> which brings up yet another major topic - windowmanagers.
> 
> some feedback, please - should the styleguide say anything about wms at all?
> if so, only some really important things, or name features we'd like to see
> like this one?
> 

It's good to go through one's mailbox and clean up - I just stumbled
across this one right now...

I've started working on a notebook interface - allow users to focus on
the document instead of the application.  The vision I have is a desktop
with several notebooks open - maybe one for each project.  They would
contain all the information pertaining to the project - source code,
docbook files, images, etc.  Each page would be a document (with the
ability of embedding documents in other documents - remember MIME allows
it) and each notebook could be broken up into sections - maybe a section
for icons, a section for source, a section for header files, ...

One thing I don't want to do is write a monolithic program to do
everything.  I want it to orchestrate the other programs - viewers,
editors, converters... - behind the scenes.  To do this, the document
should be viewed/edited in place.  This requires that the notebook have
control of the window placement for that document.  The notebook might
also need control over the menu bar - but that's a gtk/gdk issue. 
Window placement, however, is a window manager issue.

The interaction with the window manager is as follows:
The notebook needs to be able to start up a program to allow interaction
with a document.  This requires control of the program's window.  The
window manager would need to relinquish that control to the notebook. 
This should work with any X program.

If we could pull the next thing off, it would be quite interesting -
capture the applications menu and incorporate it into the notebook's
menu.  One thing I'm going to do with the GNOMEBook is create the actual
menu from a database - this allows the menu to be completely
customizable by the user and easy to change in response to the various
documents held.  If we could augment that database with the applications
menu information... (this would be more a gtk/gnome app issue, not wm)

Anyway, enough rambling for now...  Not sure if any of this is
appropriate, but at least you can see what I'd like to be able to do -
maybe the wm could help a little.

--Jim Smith