Re: Gnome2 and viewports

[Peter Wainwright <prw wainpr demon co uk>]

On Mon, 2002-02-18 at 19:44, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Gregory Merchan <merchan baton phys lsu edu> writes: 
> > Except that it doesn't make any sense for workspaces. How do you know
> > which workspace you'll land on when you go off a side? You don't
> > and shouldn't expect to because workspaces are not contiguous; 
> 
> Virtual desktops certainly can be defined to have a geometric
> relationship.

"Viewports" as they exist in the current sawfish/Gnome combination
serve no useful function (I am using current RedHat, therefore Gnome 
1.4). However this is because they do not have the full functionality
expected from a Viewport. On fvwm, I could scroll a Viewport
continuously over my workspace, thus centering any particular window
without moving it in the absolute workspace coordinates.
With the sawfish implementation, you only have a finite number of
possible views, tiling the workspace. You can only move to another
workspace by edge flipping, and a window which straddles the viewport
edge is unusable until you move it wholly within one tile or another.
Therefore this restricted concept of viewport adds nothing to what
you would already have with edge-flipping between workspaces with an
artificial spatial relationship.

I would rather see viewports reincarnated with proper continuous
scrolling - but otherwise they should be dispensed with.

>  
> But if they couldn't, or if you want windows that overlap spaces, that
> just means the implementation details of workspaces should match the
> implementation details of current viewports, rather than current
> virtual desktops. It still does not justify having both
> implementations, just changes which implementation you choose.
> 
> > According to that page, what GNOME seeks to eliminate is something
> > that, "has been long requested by many OSF/Motif users".
> 
> Any feature that ever existed in a widely-used GUI will be requested
> by lots of users. However making GNOME the union of all features in
> all widely-used GUIs would make GNOME suck big time.
> 
> Most of the hackers can't even explain the difference between a
> viewport vs. a desktop. Given that, it's totally bogus to push this
> implementation detail on end users.
> 
> Havoc
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