Re: [dev] [dwm] number of tag limited?

On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 08:35:32AM -0400, Donald Allen wrote:
> I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How tags are
> represented internally is an implementation detail. The first concern
> should be the actual behavior of dwm, because that is the software's
> primary goal. How it accomplishes that behavior internally is a
> consequence of design decisions about behavior, not the other way
> around.
Bear in mind that I was quoting what I read as a claim that dwm's implementation
of tagging isn't as suckless as it should be. Taken in context with the concerns
about "creating" and "destroying" tags, I interpreted that as a concern over the
wastefulness of unnecessary infrastructure. My point in describing the
implementation is that tagging in dwm has so little infrastructure behind it
that there's none to be wasted.

Tags in dwm aren't 'things' in the same way that they are in wmii (from what I
recall of using wmii ages ago). They aren't specifically intended to be
workspaces; they're states for controlling which windows happen to be visible at
any given moment. This is why displaying more than one tag at the same time
isn't a confusing mess. Not understanding this leads people to ask why pertag's
functionality isn't in dwm by default. And this is why the problem of how 'to
create the tag just when you move in' and to 'automatically remove them when
they are no more used' is a figment of imagination. You can't actually solve it
in dwm unless you implement the problem first, by reimplementing dwm's current
tagging behaviour in a more sucking way or by implementing a different tagging
behaviour where the problem makes any sense. You can trick yourself into
thinking that it's the problem that you've solved by not displaying the label
for unused tags, but what you'd have actually done is change the visual
indicators for exactly the same behaviour as before.

> I think Simon Parent's message, particularly the second paragraph,
> discusses the real issue at hand, the user-interface implications of
> displaying empty tags or not.
To me, asking about how to manage the 'creation' and 'destruction' of tags
implies a request concerning more than a different interface. Choosing not to
display empty tags doesn't give any less of an impression that tagging creates
something instead of just toggling a state. If anything, it reinforces the
misconception. It's not really the interface at issue so much as the baggage
carried along from one wm colouring how one interprets another.
Received on Sat Aug 07 2010 - 01:40:00 CEST