Re: [dwm] placement of tags on titles

Hi,

| I think tags should stay where they are, on the left. It's where they
|are in the statusbar, and to do it the other way around on clients is
| just confusing (and I don't see a sane way to move the tags to the
| right in the statusbar). I don't think it's that hard to get used to
| anyway (you'll have to look right to see the clientinfo anyway). In
| the long run (after taking the time to get used to it), consistency is
| far more important than the initial "what you're used to", I believe.

Just checking: are you definitely saying `it is confusing' rather than
`I can imagine logically that someone might find it confusing'? (Ie, are you
or someone you know confused by this?)

Anyway, the reason I the asked original question was because (usual caveat that I've probably got
signifcantly more windows open on my screen at times than anyone
sensible) what tends to happen is that (i) I'm much, much more
commonly looking at the `title entry' to find out the title, rather than the tag and
(ii) when I look at the titles is my eyes jumps to the different colour of
the title bar, then focus, then have to jump again when I consciously
remember it's the tag that comes first. I'm not a HCI specialist, but I
don't think these reflexes are amenable to conscious overriding. So I'd
tend to think that the increase in naturallness of an very common
operation is more important than a possible increase in confusion.

To be honest, I'm currently trying to figure out if Ross Mohn is right
and I don't actually use the tag in the `title entry' for anything non-trivial.
The only thing I can think at the moment is that I have the applications
that I attach every tag to (emulating the traditional `sticky window')
and it's useful to get visual confimation that atttaching a tag has worked.
(I still don't have a good mental model for how and when focus moves
around under dwm.)

cheers, dave tweed
Received on Tue Aug 22 2006 - 20:26:10 UTC