Re: gnome-terminal idea

[David Jeske <jeske home chat net>]

On Wed, Sep 23, 1998 at 05:18:14PM -0400, Tim Moore wrote:
> > however if you've ever used screen you'll know how much that kind of 
> > "mdi" style is supperior in terms of "speed" of use to overlaping xterms
> 
> If I've ever used screen? Is screen a program?

"screen" is a program which manages multiple text sessions over a
single outgoing session. You telnet in, run "screen" and then you can
create and destroy session, and switch between them with a key
combination. The best feature of it is that you can 'disconnect' from
a screen session without closing it, and 'reconnect' to it on another
telnet session. Meanwhile all your programs have continued to run. 

I use screen 100% of the time. I'm currently writing this email in
text-mode xemacs under Mutt under Screen over a telnet session. If my
net connection was flaky and dropped me in the middle of a sentence, I
could telnet back in an 'reconnect' and I would be exactly where I was
before.


However, to refute what the original poster said. I find screen just
as annoying as it is useful sometimes. I don't use screen to 'switch'
between multiple sessions, I almost always use multiple windows for
that. I only use screen because it gives me the ability to resume a
session if the telnet connection gets dropped. My 'ultimate' usage for
screen would be for every login session to connect to one persistant
'screen session' and create a new window. Then, I would like to be
able to telnet in from a different location and 'take over' any of
those windows, and switch between them. However, because a window
within a screen session can't be viewed from multiple-locations at the
same time, screen dosn't do this very well.

I expect I would use the 'MDI' interface the same exact way. Namely, I
would always create new windows, and I would move them to the desktop
I wanted them in. In fact, the biggest use of a notebook I can see
would be if I could setup task oritented layouts of windows, with the
same windows layed out differently. For example "edit", "compile" and
"debug" virtual desktops, where the debug desktop has the debugger
interface, the compile desktop has the compile/compile error
interface, and the edit desktop has the project view. In this case,
the 'editor' shows up in all the desktops, but perhaps not the same
size. This can be done with window managers today (mostly), and dosn't
require us to rewrite all the apps to handle some Gnome noteboook MDI
interface.


Interestingly enough, emacs and Xemacs do all of this for emacs
buffers today.

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net