Re: [gtk-list] Re: MDI?

[Tony <tonyt ptialaska net>]

On Thu, 14 May 1998, Kenneth Albanowski wrote:

> On Thu, 14 May 1998, KC5TJA wrote:

> The point about MDI is that the separate windows are _inside_, (corralled,
> if you will) the main application window. If they are shrunk to icons,
> those icons appear in the main app window, etc. Basically, _everybody_
> (including MS, who invented this thing) seems to agree that this is all a
> rather bad idea, and for X in particular it would be a miserable idea,
> unless you could figure out some way of letting the window manager manage
> the sub-window. (That in itself might be fairly neat.)
> 
> The one variant that has been invented (again, by MS) that does make some
> sense is the VB 5 approach, which replaces the sub-window manager with a
> tiled window manager. (Which isn't too easy to describe. Think something
> like the Paned widgets, but where you can rearrange the panes. Also think
> Windows 1.0 :-)

Sorry, the "paned widget" of VB5 was not invented by MS.  Not even close.
It's been around quite a while, in emacs and it's derivitives at the very
least.  Although, now that you mention it, an early MS release of MASM
came with an editor-- "M", I believe-- that was very emacs-like in the way
it handled buffers and "panes".  That was my first experience with MS
products. I loved both MASM and M.

RE: MDI:I'd rather see some sort of synthesis of the two ideas.  The main
thing I hated about the early MDIs was the way the subwindows were stuck
in the main application; I did like the way they minimized inside the
application.  It made sense.

Why not have a "docking bar"-like apparatus?  When you minimize the
document, it gets sent to the document dock, and a single click brings it
back up.  But don't restrict the document to the application's main
window.

The dock could be just about any kind of container object.  The geek in me
would love to see an area similar to the iconbox in Enlightenment, where
the minimized document is a shrunken image of the real document.

How useful would it be?  Beats me.  But it'd be fun.

						- Tony