Re: MDI (not winMDI) frameworks ... again

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Tim wrote:
> 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.

If you need the effect of lots of sub-windows in a larger window,
then each "sub-window" can be implemented as an object derived from
a GtkWidget or GtkContainer. The titlebar of each subwindow can have
a close/maximize/minimize button.