Re: MDI on X11

[Greg Badros <gjb cs washington edu>]

Matthias Ettrich <ettrich@troll.no> writes:

> On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Marko Macek wrote:
> > Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> > 
> > > What's your opinion about that? Shall we add a common MDI protocol to the
> > 
> > IMHO I'd say no.
> > 
> > > specs?  I'd say yes, given that noone is forced to implement it.
> > 
> > Good. I certainly wont. (use it or implement it).
> > 
> > BTW: Most people I have seen always have their document in word
> > maximized because mdi is just an annoyance.
> 
> Your personal optionion apart, given the choice between ugly MDI with each
> application emulation there own window manager (for example staroffice) or at
> least consistant MDI with the WM doing _all_ decorations, what would you chose?
> 
> MDI, while probably a bad choice for a wordprocessor, makes perfect sense for
> certain kind of applications: IDEs and the GIMP comes to my mind. Just the fact
> that it wasn't possible to do it on X properly while Microsoft used it doesn't
> mean it's a totally wrong concept.

I think it makes more sense to have WMs that are just better at grouping
windows together, perhaps in an extra frame.  Why make any application
that would benefit from MDI do MDI stuff when ultimately you want the WM
to decorate and manage the windows... why not just use a better WM that
supports some more MDI-like interactions.  (And perhaps some simple
hints to help control that MDI setting when the user chooses it-- e.g.,
the background color/image of the WM-generated MDI frame, etc.)

Can you be more specific about what features of MDI make perfect sense
and what you especially like from the MDI approach?  I imagine I could
put this stuff directly in Scwm pretty easily...

Greg