Re: [wmii] Stacks

--- Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin_AT_gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2/28/06, Nico Golde <nico_AT_ngolde.de> wrote:
> As for my input - I like the stacking, it's very
> much like acme.

Another view (probably a lunatic fringe view :-) ).
Whilst stacking is an improvement on lots of other
ways of doing window management, one "issue" is
scalability. If you've got ten windows it then, to
judge from brief experience with the similar facility
in acme, it works quite well; if you've got fifty
windows it starts to become awkward to figure out
where stuff is. (Apart from anything else, reading &
searching 50 element lists tends to force my attention
away from what I'm trying to do and onto the window
manager.)

(To answer the obvious question, I prefer to have "all
areas of content as first-class windows", rather than
having first a true window manager level, then
application specific multiplexers in the form of emacs
buffers, firefox tabs, materm tabs, etc. Apart from
anything else it saves me from having to figure out
which application is responsible for a given piece of
content in order to make it visible on the screen;
instead I just have to find the content in a window
manager menu/whatever. Consequently, if I'm working on
a project with 40-odd files I can easily have 50 full
X windows (most of them not visible at any one time)
in existance.)

Of course, I don't have a particularly better
solution. Due to wmii's rapid flux rate recently I'm
currently messing around with a slightly hacked Ion3
as a window manager. I've tried some stuff with
automatically building multi-level menus for selecting
windows (using some dodgy heuristics based on the
window name) and, for me personally, it works better
than the other things I've tried, but it's still a
long way from perfect. In particular, there's still
the problem that, due to common parts of file names --
eg, movementClassifier.cc, movementClassifier.hh,
movementClassifierModule.cc,
movementClassifierModule.hh, roleClassifier.cc,
roleClassifierModule.cc, .... ad nauseam -- picking
the name you want out of a menu still requires looking
at menu items that it requires concentration to tell
apart.

I'd certainly be interested if anyone has any ideas
for better WM navigation mechanisms when there are
lots of windows, and I'd imagine that if anyone can
come up with any good ones it might be of interest to
Anselm and the other wmii coders.

Anyway, just my 2 pence,
cheers, dave tweed

                
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Received on Wed Mar 01 2006 - 02:19:14 UTC