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Re: [wmx] excellent "tabbing" feature in PWM

Lasse Rasinen - Sat Jun 17 11:27:13 2000

Greck Cannon <greck@unpunk.com> writes:

> On freshmeat just now I saw an announcement about PWM, a lightweight
> window manager that allows several client windows to share the same frame.
> PWM is so very lightweight however as to not even provide unmapping
> (other than a shade function) or close functionality.  It seems the
> vertical tabs of wmx would visually lend themselves well to this idea,
> and gluing all my xterms together is an appealing idea.

I agree, that the idea is pretty nifty (you're not the first one to
suggest that ;), but there are two issues (IMHO) that need to be resolved:

1) What does it look like? PWM uses simple rectangles, but what would wmx
   look with this feature? Especially inactive windows can easily look
   silly.

   One idea that comes to mind is something like this (image flipped 90
   degrees clockwise to save space):

    _____________________________
   / xterm 1 | xterm 2 | xterm 3 |
   ------------------------------|
                                 |

   ie. only the lowest has the triangular edge we know and love.
   Someone could probably do a mockup picture easily (I would do it
   now if I wasn't so dead tired. If someone doesn't beat me to it, expect
   one later today or tomorrow)

   Mmm... actually that I visualize that, it might work pretty nicely.

2) The window switching operations. Both the right mouse button and
   Alt-Tab (or equivalent) currently switch between windows? How would one
   switch between tabs on a keyboard? How would one attach a new tab to
   an existing window?

   Someone needs to come up with a real good UI. Sorry, but I'm out of
   ideas at this point.

-- 
Lasse Rasinen                       I put it all down in a letter once      
lrasinen@iki.fi                     A letter I don't send                   
                                    It made me feel much better at the time 
                                    I thought it'd help me mend


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