Re: [Usability] window manager configuration

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Thu, 2001-12-06 at 22:23, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
>   Number of workspaces (once you assume workspaces are OK ;-)
>   Name of each workspace

I don't know if this is crack-ridden bogosity or not -- and strictly
speaking it's not an option request so much as a whinge, but I have
a couple of issues with Sawfish's workspace handling that would be
enough to make me switch to a different window manager.

  1) Can't tell what the point is of having both "workspaces"
     and "viewports" except that they have random behavioral
     differences.

  2) Can't constrain movement between workspaces to only be
     horizontal (which from a Fitts' law perspective makes
     top and bottom panels a pain to use).

  3) "Windows deiconify to current workspace" works for 
     deiconifying from the panel, but not for deiconifying
     from the Ximian task menu (not really a window manager
     issue, probably, but it drives me up the wall, and what
     the heck, this is the usability list :>).

Those are the ones that really make me unhappy. If I could get
my employer to spring for a multi-head setup, I'd do away with
workspaces entirely. Less important:

  4) I kind of liked old-fashioned Motif-style iconification
     where "iconify" really mean "iconify" and not "hide unless
     you happen to have some other app, e.g., the tasklist, that
     shows hidden applications for you". Whatever happened to it?

I do think that for non-Unix-experienced users, "iconify" is
misleading.

One thing I've wondered for a while is, how easy would it be for
someone putting together a distribution to change a lot of these
strings -- e.g., if you were putting together a distribution
targeted at ex-Windows users, could you change "iconify" to
"minimize" in some way other than patching all the sources?

Breaking some of these things out would make it easier to please
more of the people more of the time -- geeks who'd hold their
breath and turn blue if they didn't get the "traditional" names,
crack-smoking behaviors, and whatnot could put together a geek
distribution, and someone like Ximian could put together a Joe
User distribution.

--D