Re: gnome-terminal idea



On Wed, 23 Sep 1998 17:18:14 EDT Tim Moore wrote:



> Wouldn't that be great?! It's another form of window docking, but this
> time the windows are docked next to each other instead of on top of
> each other.

> So is this window management or something GNOME should be handling?

> I would argue that its window management. If the window manager
> handles this, I think it would be much simpler. It's already close to
> what window managers are doing, and I think a natural extension. On
> the other hand, it may be able to work as another layer between the WM
> and the app by having an app which "swallows" windows. I don't know
> much about how that works, though (it's time for me to go buy some
> Xlib books, I think) so I really don't know if that's feasable. But if
> it is, perhaps that's the best solution because it still allows WM
> independence. In any case, it doesn't belong in the gnome libraries,
> as it shouldn't be implemented seperately by each app. But by a
> "notebook manager" if you will. I still think that multiple-document
> apps should be implemented by running multiple instances of
> single-document apps, even if the UI is the same as a MDI app. 

> So what do people think of this? 

After browsing over this window/MDI-stuff, I think it boils all 
down to that: Users have a need for *grouping* windows (or documents or 
whatever). Usual window managers just know about one group of windows, 
some may handle every virtual desktop as a one group, but that's obviously 
not enough. MS Windows handles this issue with that well-known 
per-application MDI, so that the user can easily switch between, say, 
Word documents without cycling through all open windows or documents.

The problem with this approach is: if you like to have a development 
environment with editor, debugger etc., you need an complete app with 
built-in editor and debugger and all. Yeah. 

If a windowmanager would offer the capability to group arbritary windows
together, so that one might switch between windows within a group with
(as example) Alt-Tab and switch between complete groups of windows with
Alt-Esc, the user (and not the programmer of some app) could decide what
windows/documents should be handled as a group.

IMHO that's a window manager issue and not a gnome issue. The wm should
offer some menu ("group windows") - arrange your windows to taste,
select that menu, click once in every window you would like to be
"grouped", finally give a name to this group and you're done. From now
on, all this windows are moved/raised/lowered together and listed with
the group's name in a taskbar.

That would make a kind of "personal MDI" and that's really the only kind
of MDI I would like. Just clicking xemacs, gimp and netscape windows in
one group and name it "webwork", that makes more sense to me than any
sophisticated MDI library stuff in gnome, sorry.


	Jochem


-- 

#   Jochem Huhmann <joh@uni-duisburg.de>  Duisburg (Germany)
#   PGP fingerprint = 6C 85 FC 93 31 10 4E 81  1F 4C BE 4E 21 72 B3 7B  
#
#   Der Red Hat Kompakt-Index:  http://www.revier.com/redhat/




[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]