Re: [wmii] Re: layout per tag.

On 8/11/06, Bill Puschmann <puschy_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> But that's exactly the point. These are not workspaces. These are "tags
> currently in use". Part of the effort of WMII is to rethink a lot of the
> desktop metaphors that currently exist. That's also part of the "dynamic"
> nature of this window manager - it shows you what's currently available and
> changes as appropriate.
> By selecting a tag, you're not saying "Show me the Mail workspace" - you're
> saying "show me all the windows tagged as 'Mail' on the one and only
> workspace that I have".

Exactly. Tags != workspaces. Those things in the bottomleft of your
screen in wmii are not workspaces, strictly taken not even views, they
are the individual tags that you have currently given to at least one
window, and the highlighted one indicates what is currently visible.
In the desktop/workspace paradigm, each workspace should be thought of
as a separate 'desk', so you're working at multiple 'desks' at the
same time (in real life you'd need quite a big room to do this).
In the the tagging paradigm, there is just one desktop/workspace,
where you put certain tags/labels on each individual window, and tell
the computer something like "now clean my desk, leave only the windows
with label 'mail' on it" (which is, I believe, closer to the real life
situation; so in a certain way, wmii is actually a better
implementation of the 'desktop methaphor' than most DE's ;-). ..

> (I don't want this to sound mean, but) Read through the archives of this
> mailing list. This was discussed at extreme length in the beginning of
> 2006. We went back and forth about how to conceptualize the environment.
> And then there was the whole debate about "once you close the last window in
> a tagset, should the tag be deleted"... I know... because I lost that round
> :)

No you didn't! It (rightfully) didn't make it into wmii-3 (it was
simply to short before release for such a change), but it (also
rightfully) has been in -current since approximately a day or so after
3.0 was released.

Gr. Sander.
Received on Fri Aug 11 2006 - 16:00:12 UTC