Re: File dialogs: an attempt at a summary

[Dylan Griffiths <Dylan_G bigfoot com>]

Ken Fox wrote:
> Many of the things on your list are already configurable with X APIs.
> The double click rate is a per-toolkit configurable parameter, not a
> core X feature. (I suppose you hate this too, but consider that it
> would piss off toolkit developers if they were forced to live with a
> 400 millisecond latency between all mouse click events. X already
> includes server-side time stamps on all events, so double clicks are
> trivial in a toolkit.)

Alright, so why don't we have proper applications to provide a baseline for
everyone to use then?  It'd be nice if this all worked as if it were a
coherent whole, like Windows or the MacOS environments.
 
> > There are other major problems with X, but these are the main ones I
> > think of when I think of how X handles input (and the clipboard).
> 
> Get a clue before you pop off on something you don't understand.

Thanks for being nice about this :-P
 
> X has some really nice features that a lot of applications totally
> misuse/abuse/avoid. It would be like Microsoft doing a really terrible
> port of Office to Linux and then everybody bitching about how horrible
> Linux is.

Then let's find and either improve or replace these broken applications
ASAP!  I'm sure patches would do more for the community than tossing back
and forth emails.

Bytes are cheap, working programs help make computers useable for more
things than "Expensive paperweights."
 
> The rule of thumb for bitching about X is whenever you get the urge
> to say "X sucks because of ..." replace "X" with "This application".
> If it's a real problem with X then the developers will be happy to
> tell you exactly why and how much X sucks.

I am a developer, I've just ever attempted to use Xt or Xlib..  The only X
related program I've done is with the GTK+ and Gnome API libraries, which
provide a nice level of control (vs. the evil Win32 API stuff I did in the
late 1990s).

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