Re: GNOME 2.0 Must Fix - Sawfish

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 05Sep2001 06:24PM (-0700), Kenny Graunke wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> http://boom.whitecape.org/Fixes/sawfish.html has draft 2 of the sawfish must
> fix list. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
>

Man, I knew I shouldn't have subscribed to this list, I just can't
stop having opinions. 

The proposal is a mixture of specific individual suggestions and a
suggestion to use the Klarth theme as the default. I'll put in my two
cents about the Klarth theme and then comment on the individual
suggestions (many of which I like).

My main comment about the Klarth theme is that while it may have some
usability improvements compared to Crux, it does not look as good. In
particular it doesn't match the Crux Gtk+ theme (as seen in the
screenshot), although I don't know if that's a big deal. I suspect it
also wouldn't match the default Gtk theme very well either. The main
problem is that in Klarth tthe title bar and buttons have gradients
and edges that make them appear to indent in slightly, while in crux
gtk everything bulges out slightly. The combination is not so good. Of
course, I am a bit biased because the Crux Gtk and Sawfish theme
combination is the first and only one ever to make me forget that the
window manager is a separate program. 

I also don't like the fact that the whole title bar is colored with
the selection color. Is there a reason this is useful? It's kind of
visual overkill.


Now onto comments about the specific suggetsions (some of which I
think we should try to apply to the Crux sawfish theme).

* Respecting Gtk theme colors: good
* Title bar height adjusting for font: good
* button order: good
* button graphics being [+] [-]   [x] : good (wow, I can't stop agreeing here)

* More flexibility in choosing button order: this may be good, but
only if we dump a bunch of the other current sawfish settings from the
control center; there's too many right now to add something that takes
that much screen space

* Window shading: sounds fine.

* button states changing: I suggest the default theme not provide a
way to vertical-only or horizontal-only maximize, as this is a
confusing feature and and worse yet makes the maximize button have
four different states.

* buttons taking filling the full titlebar height: I think the
usability argument for this is spurious, given the fact that on MacOS
9, MacOS X, Win9x, etc the button does not take the full height and I
don't hear about a lot of users accidentally closing windows. Most
windows that are dangerous to close will ask for confirmation (web
browser windows being one admitted exception).

Having the button take the full height looks worse, and does not as
strongly convey the fact that it is a button. Also, you don't need to
make the window resizable from the corner closest to the close button
just because the button does not take the full height. In fact, this
is not the case on MacOS X or MacOS classic (they both provide a large
and obvious resize affordance in the lower right corner of the window;
I'm not sure how easy that is to do on the X window system given how
window managers work.

* resize handles: the top border should be a resize handle! Otherwise
it's unnecessarily complicated to resize windows downwards. The
corners adjacent to the top side are debatable for reasons cited but
surely the top edge is uncontroversial.

* Resize handles on maximized windows: this is debatable, but how
about leaving them in and automatically turning off the maximized
state for the window if the user resizes it? I personally would find
it convenient at times to make a window full screen, and then resize
it to somewhat smaller without having to do a separate unmaximize step
first.

* context menus: maybe we should have this off by default. No major
mainstream GUI has a window manager context menu. Perhaps there should
be an advanced setting to turn it on.

* Window attributes... dialog: at least this part should definitely be
off by default.

* Titlebar text: consider ellipsizing in the middle rather than at the
end, for the same reason I suggested it for the task list earlier
(many windows will have titles with an identical prefix and a unique
suffix).

* Confusing options: I think it's at least as important to remove more
of these from the beginner level as it is to remove some from expert.

* Option wording: I really like the suggestions included here. How
about having even more specific suggestions instead of a general
complaint about the wording?


Perhaps I can help patch Sawfish and the control-center with some of
these suggested improvements if no one else is available to do it (a
lot of them sound easier to implement than the Nautilus suggestions
:-).

 - Maciej