[wmii] Re: tags vs. views

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 10:44:48PM +0200, Sander van Dijk wrote:
> I noticed that the bottom left of the bar displays the current views,
> not the current tags, which is what I believe it should be displaying.
> Actually It's not showing the current possible views, but rather the
> 'cached' views.
>
> To see what I mean, create three windows. Tag each one with a
> different tag (say 1,2,3). Now the bar shows [1][2][3]. So far so
> good, but when i select a joint view (echo -n "view 1+2" | wmiir write
> /ctl), a fourth label [1+2] appears. I believe that this shouldn't
> happen, as it is (well, might be) a bit confusing: why is there a
> label [1+2], but no labels [1+3], [2+3] and [1+2+3]? Also, if I do a
> (echo -n "view 2+1" | wmiir write /ctl), I'll end up with both a [1+2]
> and a [2+1] on the bar. The appearance of joint views on the bar
> (which appear on selection) is not consistent with the appearance of
> singular views (which appear on creation of the respective tag).
>
> There seem to be two ways to restore consistency here: always show all
> (possible) views, or display tags instead of views.
> Since always displaying all possible views is ugly and leads to
> combinatory problems (the combinations of more than five tags aren't
> going to fit on the bar), I think only individual tags should be
> displayed on the bar (selecting the respective singular view when
> mouseclicked), instead of views. The possibilty of viewing multiple
> tags at once, or tagging a window with multiple tags, should be
> explained in the README/welcome/wmii.de instead.
>
> To summarize: I believe joint views should not be shown on the bar,
> just individual tags should appear there. Hope you agree!

No. The bar displays tags and cached views in a distinct way
(actually I'm going to push a change which makes this more
clear, because each view in the bar will contain a [n] suffix
displaying the selected area of the view).

Distinct in this regard means, if a view exists for a specific
tag, the tag is not displayed (because the view has the same
name). If a view has not been created for specific tag(s) it is
not displayed, but the tags are displayed (now without the [n]
suffix).

If the bar would only show tags instead of views, you never
would be able to know, that there exist non-empty cached views
consisting of several tags (ie. 1+2). That would suck badly
because there won't be an easy way to select them, nor to know
about their existence at all. But you want to know about their
existence because they remember layout information.

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361