[Usability]Re: Window managers -- what constitutes crack?

[Michael Toomim <toomim uclink4 berkeley edu>]

Josh Hoyt wrote:

> In my transition to Gnome2, my last holdout is sticking with sawfish
> instead of metacity because of one feature. That feature is a
> keybinding for packing windows. Manually positioning windows is
> tedious, and it's hard to position them so they exactly line up.

There's that, and then there's the ability to move windows by N pixels 
up/down/left/right, and the ability to grow/shrink windows by N pixels. 
 There are a *lot* of these keyboard-binding features used in sawfish 
that would have to be re-implemented in metacity.

But why go and re-implement all this functionality in a new window 
manager?  If sawfish has too many options, why not just remove some of 
the options?  From an engineering standpoint, it makes a lot more sense 
than implementing a whole new window manager, doesn't it?

IMHO, sawfish has a whole lot going for it (like lisp extensibility and 
flexibility) that makes it very nice system as a whole, and very easy to 
extend and engineer.  I don't see the point of redoing all this from 
scratch, in C, in a new window manager.