Comments on: Documents and Windows

By: Gaël Varoquaux

Gaël Varoquaux — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:18:24 +0000

@Mart: In a way yes. Mayavi2 does not rely on it in its current version, but once we move to traits3, we will indeed be using wxAUI. In the meanwhile I think we are using some home-made code (it is buried in traits, and I don’t have the courage to look).

The value this adds to gnome-terminal like behavior is the ability to re-attach tabs, and the ability to have a split-screen (a bit like mc, or emacs, vim…). It is also very versatile, so we we are constraining the user.

By: Calum

Calum — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 13:54:07 +0000

@Michel: The shortcut for switching between windows in an application is the CUE standard, Alt+F6.

By: reinouts

reinouts — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:57:17 +0000

@Mart: see this bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400363

By: Mart Raudsepp

Mart Raudsepp — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:18:49 +0000

@reinouts:
Would be awesome if epiphany supported detaching tabs and attaching them to a different window. I currently have 10 epiphany windows open with over 10 tabs in each and it’s a maintenance nightmare because to move a tab to a different epiphany window (where each window is meant for a different topic – gnome bugs in this window as tabs, gentoo bugs in that window as tabs, etc) after it has been opened in the wrong one due to “open in new tab” usage.

@Gaël: Is this wxAUI that you are describing? I see the deps list wxPython-2.6, not 2.8 where it was added to wx proper. I suppose it’s using an external AUI if it’s only 2.6 that’s made available?

In general, I don’t see what value does this idea provide that a proper detachable tabs idea doesn’t – like gnome-terminal provides.

By: reinouts

reinouts — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:17:04 +0000

Just a small clarification here. Epiphany supports tabs because it’s a basic necessity in the web browsing experience and the window manager doesn’t solve the problem for us.
However you’re not forced to use tabbed browsing in Epiphany, and if you don’t, you’ll notice it behaves very much as an SDI-application.

By: juergbi

juergbi — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 10:29:48 +0000

@jospoortvliet: A tabbed window manager doesn’t solve the issue that the window arrangements are not persistent, I don’t want to manually group windows all the time. You could probably implement something similar to my suggestion on top of a tabbed window manager.

@Michel: I don’t want the same behavior as in OS X, there it’s all application centric and that’s not suitable if you use multiple windows of the same application for different purposes – I’ve never used OS X, so I don’t really know the dock.

@Richard: It’s not about single documents, more about windows that you’d reuse for many documents (usually for one task).

@Jerome: The naming should of course be optional, you can always just use the default window title. I hope you didn’t expect a popup with a text entry every time you open a new window. The intension is that you can set a name if you want to use the window regularly. The 1:1 mapping between documents and windows results in way too many windows for many people. I don’t want to open empty gedit windows but I may want to open a gedit window with 5 documents I often edit together and so it makes sense in my opinion to be able to create a launcher (optionally with custom name and icon) for the combination of the 5 documents.

@Gaël: These features – as for example also found in Eclipse – make certainly sense for many applications, it would be very nice if e.g. gedit had this. The two ideas are not in conflict and can be implemented independently, though.

@Chris: I’m not talking about iconification. The window should have a persistent icon that stays there when you really close the window, not just hide/minimize it, it also remains at the same place after logout and login (independent of session restore). The colored border would be a window border, not only an icon border, this might help identifying the right icon faster than with small thumbnails. I also didn’t suggest to use the desktop background as a window list, it should still be in a panel applet or dock-like window.

By: Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 09:57:42 +0000

This concept of “closing a window and it becomes a desktop icon”. Ummm. Isn’t that iconification, which has been around for decades? And rather than “a specific coloured border” or whatever, isn’t a thumbnail of the contents more useful? So you’re basically talking about using the desktop itself as a window list, with open documents shown as thumbnails of their contents. Sort of like having an always-on Exposé.

– Chris

By: Gaël Varoquaux

Gaël Varoquaux — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:34:53 +0000

Interesting proposal. There some interesting idea, but it sparked an
idea, and I come with another proposal.

SDI and MDI are both broken. MDI with tabs is broken as I may want to
work with two documents, viewing both at the same time. For instance I
may be filling a form in Firefox, from info on a second webpage, and I
would like to display both side to side (I have a very wide screen). SDI
is broken as it clutters windows switching. If I am working with the
Gimp, with a large amount of windows open, switching from on to another
is not easy, as I have maximize all of them, to see the whole picture.

I propose a tab-oriented MID from which I could rip off tabs. Gnome
terminal does this. It also as the brilliant feature that I can drag a tab
from one Gnome terminal to another. Moreover I want to be able to drag
back a tab in a window. I also would like to be able to rearrange tab so
that they pave the window. For instance I would like to start from a
situation as seen on http://www.gael-varoquaux.info/tabs/start.png , grab
a tab by its label, and drag it to the side of the window, as can be seen
on http://www.gael-varoquaux.info/tabs/move_to_side.png (the cursor has
not been captured by the screenshot), to end up in a situation like
http://www.gael-varoquaux.info/tabs/split.png , and to be able to move be
to initial situation by dragging the tab header to next to the other tab
headers, as can be seen on
http://www.gael-varoquaux.info/tabs/move_to_tab.png .

This behavior is actually implemented by Mayavi2, if you want to try it,
instruction for instal are on
https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/Install .

If you like this idea, please repost it on your blog, it will have more
impact like this, and it get go around in the Gnome community. I’d really
love to see this implemented.

Cheers.

By: pel

pel — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:34:42 +0000

It would be a neat thing to be able to group windows/application by task.
Today I switch between different accounts for different tasks.

One for coding, one for administrative work and one for just plain casual use (web/music/movies). Needles to say.. there is quite an overlap in applications (web-browser, IM, irc and general desktop apps). If I could switch applications depending on the task I was performing it would remove my need for seperate accounts and free up a lot of memmory.

And no, seperate workspaces is not quite cutting it here.. I use many workspaces for all of these “tasks”.

By: Jerome Haltom

Jerome Haltom — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 18:22:42 +0000

I’d be sceptical of the value of forcing users to manually color and name things. Anything. It’s a pain in the ass, and not relevent to the task at hand.

And I’d be less focused on windows and more focused on the documents or applications themselves. There should be an obvious 1:1 mapping between them. A single document on the desktop results in a single window.

Also, there are some applications which are not served by being launchable without a document context. Gedit is one of these. There is no reason to open gedit. There are only reasons to create new documents and open them or open existing documents. I’d try to clear this up.

That said, you’d end up with a set of icons in your launcher which corresponded to actions: new document X, open document Y.

Applications that are not document centric do sort of stand out, though.