Re: I think we should have a Gnome Window Manager

[jchrr post uni-bielefeld de]

Hi !

>  That sounds good.  Let me clarify my position regarding Enlightenment: I
> don't dislike the window manager, I dislike the size of its default 
> themes. The themes idea is great (MacOS looks better with the Aron (sp?)
								^^^^^
			renamed to Kaleidoscope, btw... uses a resource-
			mechanism to allow "themes" for borders and widgets,
			but no shapes like E has.
			
> extension.) I do think we should provide some kind of useable default.  I
> think new users will appreciate it.  Technical people don't look at this
> type of thing the same way as non-technical people do.  Non-technical
> people don't *want* their desktop to change (in my experience, this has
> held true.)  They want their resize buttons to look and work the same, and
> they raise hell when they don't.  Technical people tend to adapt to such

Ok, what do we want from a wm ?

Before we talk about the look and themes, we should talk about functionality.

First and most important is the support of existing standards and technologies,
for configuring the decoration of a window. This are esp. the close and kill
buttons. If an application supports a close/quit menu-entry, it shouldn't be
possible to kill it with an accidental mouseclick. It should be possible for
an application for overriding these decorations.

Second it must be possible to configure things like the root-menu, or hotkeys
at runtime. Ok, Unix/X allows to restart the WM, when the configuration has
changed, but this is not a very nice solution. What if I only want to kick
one entry out of the root-menu, because I uninstalled a program. This would
be similar to the "You have got to restart Windows to get the changes active"
dialog in MS-Windows.

So: Could someone with a clue about WMs make a list, what belongs to a WM,
which standards are available, what the $%&# are MWM-hints, and which WM
supports which features ?

				Jens Ch. Restemeier