MDI (not winMDI) frameworks ... again

[Tim <jpyobjc2004 yahoo ca>]

Firstly, I agree with all prior posts that M$ has destroyed the concept 
of MDI by having the window in window approach using a window menu and 
having maximized sub windows, tiled or cascaded. This type of MDI is 
what another user called winMDI and I totally agree that it sucks big time.

However, MDI is still used (very well I might add) by other applications 
such as IDE's (KDevelop, Netbeans, Eclipse and even Apples X-Code).

Many have suggested that MDI should be the job of the window manager. 
This cannot work for the time being since no *nix app should ever be 
tied into one window manager. Maybe someday in the long future when the 
WM world stabilizes sufficiently, this would work but for the 
foreseeable future this is an unrealistic ideal.

In the meantime, developers are left hanging with putting out apps that 
have just way too many windows. I've used Gimp on my OSX box and it 
totally sucks having to first clicking the window to get focus before 
being able to click the item. If the app ran on a MDI framework, this 
would not be necessary.

I have ton's of apps open at one time and if I did not have MDI for 
those apps, I'd have too many windows to manage.

Tim

winMDI == evil
MDI != evil (potentially)