[Thread Prev][Thread Next]   >Date Index >Thread Index

[wmx] window stacking and multiple tabs

cannam - Mon Jun 19 12:43:08 2000

An Thi-Nguyen Le <viper@srh0967.urh.uiuc.edu> writes:
> On Sun, Jun 18, 2000 at 02:12:08PM +0300, Lasse Rasinen typed:
> } 
> }  ___________________________
> } / xterm / xterm | xterm [ ]|
> } 
> } Here the middle one is active
> 
> This looks a lot nicer.

I think the distinction is too fine; it's too difficult to see
which one is active at a glance.  And that's important, because
the sorts of window you'd be overlaying would be likely to be
of similar type (a bunch of xterms, for instance) that wouldn't
be very visually distinct otherwise.  You only need to erase an
important client's live website by typing "rm -rf ." into the
wrong xterm once to appreciate how important this is.

I would consider going for diagonal lines across all three tabs
always (as in pwm-wm-4-top.gif) and then using a lighter
background colour (or a bold font, but that has the disadvantage
of changing the lengths of the tabs when you click on one of
them) for the active one.

Which leads to another problem: How does PWM cope when you add
together so many windows, or windows with such long names, that
all the title bars no longer fit along the top?  If you only
have one title bar you can just truncate the name, but there's
a limit to how far you can truncate each one of many before it
becomes impossible to see which is which -- especially if the
title bar is on the side and the window is short.

> } I prefer hiding the entire frame and closing just the
> } current frame (not that I use close too much, but...)

Horribly inconsistent, but none of the alternatives is too
attractive either.  You certainly can't have close closing all
the frames at once, and the point of hide is to get a window
out of the way which it won't do if it only hides one of them.

> Hmmm.  What about the client menu?  I suppose it can just
> be the same; selecting an entry would raise that stack as
> well as making the entry top of the stack.

Yep.

> } I feel this would mean a thorough rewrite of (at least)
> } the Border class.

I think it probably would.  And I have to say that although I
think it's quite an intriguing feature, I have absolutely no
intention of coding it myself.  Anyone else is welcome though.

btw, note that for xterms at least there is another kind of
a solution to the same problem in the shape of PowerShell, a
terminal emulator that allows you to tab between several active
sessions at once.  http://powershell.pdq.net/ -- I haven't
tried it myself yet, but it looks like a potentially useful tool.


Chris




Next: