Yes, this is a window manager issue, but in a sense it is also an issue that should be addressed. There is a window manager out there that does a very cool thing: depending on the focus, the main window will jump to 23 of the screen (or user-defined), while the other windows will tile or stack (user preference) on teh right, so that instead of having to iconify your apps, they are simply on teh left for easy reference and viewing. The window manager is larswm (http://www.fnurt.net/larswm/) The thing is, larswm is not as feature-rich as other WMs (say, sawfish), but its one awesome feature is that the winodwing is intelligent. In a lot of ways, while Lars himself did an INCREDIBLY good job, but already-existing technologies could have been used to make intelligent window management. Sawfish, for instance, has a backend that allows event-driven intelligent scripting of windows. What if there were scripts that allowed for the behaviour above (intelligent tiling) or ones that emulateed the Mac interface, or even the proto MacOSX idea of having only one app on teh screen at once, and everything else gets automagically iconized?? Apparently this is very easy to do.... but I have of yet to get it to work (I spoke a while ago with the creators of the Sawfish scripting backend and even he couldn't help me get my machine to work correctly (I will admit, it was prolly 80% user error ;-) At any rate, the point is that if someone were to make a good GUI frontend for making the scripting very easy, or even give a simple GUI way of choosing behaviours of windows, then things like the PC magazine article would nto exist (or at least we would keep making the GUI better and better). What if you could tell the computer how you wanted it to react? If anyone would like to help start this project, I would love to help, if I can ever get Sawfish's scripting to work correctly <aarrrgghh> William Kendrick wrote: > > "7. When you automatically tile multiple applications (by right-clicking on > > a blank spot on the Taskbar), why can't the individual apps realize they'll > > have less screen real estate and offer to get rid of the space-hogging > > scroll bars and toolbars? > > > > 8. And why can't you have presets that let you give, say, two-thirds of the > > screen to your word processor and one-third to e-mail, as opposed to always > > giving each tiled app exactly the same amount of space?" > > Frankly, these are window-manager issues, not really GNOME issues. > Not that they're BAD issues, I'm just not sure if they're very relevant > to this mailing list. ;) > > -bill! > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-gui-list mailing list > gnome-gui-list gnome org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-gui-list
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